Read Online The Notched Hairpin by H. F. Heard - Free Book Online

believe, warrant a visit.” And with that, leaving me to roam the leagues, he went back to brood on the narrow-bound which so long had been his real perspective.
    When I came back at last, having taken in quite a good deal, he had given up even this peering into the next garden. As I came toward him, he scrambled up from his knees. For a moment I suffered a twinge of alarm. Was this another attack of breathlessness, like that which had taken him just before we had completed our climb up to this, our present airy station? As I found him now, he had just risen from kneeling with his elbows resting on the parapet. But to my sympathetic question, he simply replied in that Mycroft manner, “Kneeling is today a neglected way of resting and clearing the mind. And look at this odd object I’ve found, actually by kneeling on it where it lay just under this coving of the breastwork. What do you think it can be?”
    To that question, did I know what it was, he no doubt expected from me a refreshingly vacant but interested “No.” But I was able quite quickly, and with no little pleasure at my not being at a loss, to say I did.
    â€œIt’s what is called a stretcher,” I remarked. “I’ve watched gardeners—when I’ve been sitting in gardens—using such things when putting up wire fences for creeping plants to grow on. It’s really a jointed lever—works on the principle of a spring shoetree.”
    His further, “What do you think it’s doing here?” didn’t find me at a loss either. Looking round, I saw that the mellow old tiles, assaulted by equinoctial gales, showed the signs that Mrs. Sprigg had told us about below. They had been defended and held fast by wires stretched along their courses. Pointing at them, I remarked, “It was used for that job, I feel sure.” An then, beginning to feel hungry, I suggested that we might take a real close-up and see what the hotel had given us.
    â€œIt’s a bit drafty and at the same time hot up here,” he replied. “Let’s go down into the garden.”
    It was a right suggestion and I fell in with it. For a moment Mr. M. fingered the stretcher and I thought he was going to take it along with him. But finally he seemed to have decided to leave it where it was in no one’s way. For when we assembled ourselves, after our climb down had brought us to the top of the proper stairs and we could go abreast, only that portfolio, without which he would feel himself as undressed as would I without my necktie, was in his hand.
    When we came into the presence of Mrs. Sprigg, she was graciousness itself as he asked if we might eat in her garden, and insisted on adding to our solids a magnum bottle of the local cider to keep our liquid balance, as bankers say, on the right side. Yes, the day was going well.
    But of course Mr. M. couldn’t settle at once to eat in the obvious place which my eye had picked out immediately as the picnic spot. Though there was no bower, this place, like its twin over the way, had grass banks and seats set under the warm side of the yew hedges. Almost as though he were a game dog, he must smell and poke about before he could come to rest. So naturally in the end he did succeed—and serve him right—in coming on the seamy side of even this seemly place. He ferreted out the incinerator, nicely concealed behind the thickest yew hedge at the very bottom of the garden and set against the terminal brick wall. And then? Now that you know him, you will believe it, so I needn’t ask, “Could you?” He poked about in the debris, “just to reconstruct,” as he used to say, “the life of the place”—that horrid archaeological passion that never can see the thing as it is but always wants to pull it to pieces to see how it came to be as nice as it is, and is far more interested in fossilized refuse than in living beauty. “Dissecting the