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

fairest complexion, To see how the blushes arrive!”
    I had just thought of that rather pretty couplet—which made me less inclined to be satirical, as I myself had just produced a spray of loveliness—when Mr. M. turned to me, “Find a place in the sun. I know you can always do that, and I’ll join you in a moment.”
    I was certainly ready to be dismissed to a happier spot. As I left him I saw that, as he had succeeded in finding nothing that even for a moment took his fancy but some old packages which had contained that far too virile tobacco, Gold Flake , he had taken up the big pronged stoker’s fork and, like a medieval devil, had begun to poke in the depths of the still smoldering furnace.
    I had, however, only had time to settle myself in, spread the lunch out, select a wing of chicken, a couple of slices of tongue and some salad, and pour myself a glass of the cider, when he appeared round the corner from his shabby retirement. Need I say, he was with a find. And once more my luck held up under the routine sentry-challenge.
    â€œWhat do you think this is?”
    As promptly as on the roof, I answered.
    â€œIt is what is called a laminated spring. Further, I would venture to say, with high probability that amounts to practical certainty, that it comes from one of those old wheelchairs which were so sprung—those chairs in which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gout victims and apoplectics, who had had their first port-invoked strokes, were hauled about by what were called Bath-chair men. Not only do I know my cartoonists, my Gilray and Rowlandson, but, as it happens, my grandmother, though she never took port, was, if I may pun, towed to her port and final berth—like that ancient, demoded battleship, The Fighting Téméraire,’ in Turner’s somewhat hackneyed picture—in just such a Bath chair. Often, in that devious departure, I, as dutiful child and potential, if then distant, residual legatee, walked clad in sailor costume beside her equipage, at the funeral pace at which that kind of vehicle proceeded, and wiled away the boredom by fancying how I might use one of those small but tough springs that bounced her bulk up and down over the cobbles.”
    Again I think Mr. M. was taken aback at my luck, which twice in succession had balked him of his wish to explain, because in advance I knew. I added, taking another glass of the really excellent cider, “No doubt, one of the earlier owners of this gracious spot was eighteenth century in all his ways and, as a ‘three bottle man’ when bottles meant port and were crusted, himself became somewhat crusted in old age; had his first stroke; took to his Bath chair; and so made, a little later, his final journey to the parish church, where he settled down for good behind a fine slab of imported Carrara marble. The Bath chair hung about until some tidy person in this age of tidiness kindly cremated it, and sent it, Chinese-wise, to carry the old ancestor in state through the courts and gardens of the other world. This, without doubt, is its relic.”
    I was pleased with the élan of my counterattack.
    Mr. M. was so rebuffed that he had to remark to cover his retreat, “Perhaps if you could spare me a little of that cider I might become almost as eloquent and your walk home possibly less devious.”
    But when he had drunk his share and we had munched in the silence of content till there was nothing left of our supplies but the paper that had wrapped them, all he said was, “I think I’d better take these traces of our fête champêtre and, like a good detective, conceal our tracks.”
    I stayed while he loped off round the corner to dispose of what to his mind was a possible clue.
    After the incinerator had received its due, he reappeared and we ambled back to the house. We were met by a beaming Mrs. Sprigg, who, after hoping we had enjoyed our lunch and obviously