what we were to do with it.
'The correct procedure, I believe,' I said, 'is to drop it into the fire with a sharp exclamation of disgust.'
I suited the action to the word, and Joanna applauded.
'You did that beautifully,' she said. 'You ought to have been on the stage. It's lucky we still have fires, isn't it?'
'The waste-paper basket would have been much less dramatic,' I agreed. 'I could, of course, have set light to it with a match and slowly watched it burn – or watched it slowly burn.'
'Things never burn when you want them to,' said Joanna. 'They go out. You'd probably have had to strike match after match.'
She got up and went toward the window. Then, standing there, she turned her head sharply.
'I wonder,' she said, 'who wrote it?'
'We're never likely to know,' I said.
'No – I suppose not.' She was silent a moment, and then said: 'I don't know when I come to think of it that it is so funny after all. You know, I thought they – they liked us down here.'
'So they do,' I said. 'This is just some half-crazy brain on the borderline.'
'I suppose so. Ugh-nasty!'
As she went out into the sunshine I thought to myself as I smoked my after-breakfast cigarette that she was quite right. It was nasty. Someone resented our coming here – someone resented Joanna's bright young sophisticated beauty – someone wanted to hurt. To take it with a laugh was perhaps the best way – but deep down it wasn't funny.
Dr. Griffith came that morning. I had fixed up for him to give me a weekly overhaul. I liked Owen Griffith. He was dark, ungainly, with awkward ways of moving and deft, very gentle hands. He had a jerky way of talking and was rather shy.
He reported progress to be encouraging. Then he added,
'You're feeling all right, aren't you? Is it my fancy, or are you a bit under the weather this morning?'
'Not really,' I said. 'A particularly scurrilous anonymous letter arrived with the morning coffee, and it's left rather a nasty taste in the mouth.'
He dropped his bag on the floor. His thin dark face was excited. 'Do you mean to say that you've had one of them?'
I was interested.
'They've been going about, then?'
'Yes. For some time.'
'Oh,' I said. 'I see. I was under the impression that our presence as strangers was resented here.'
'No, no, it's nothing to do with that. It's just -' He paused and then asked, 'What did it say? At least' – he turned suddenly red and embarrassed – 'perhaps I oughtn't to ask?'
'I'll tell you with pleasure,' I said. 'It just said that the fancy tart I'd brought down with me wasn't my sister – not half! And that, I may say, is a shortened version.'
His dark face flushed angrily.
'How damnable! Your sister didn't – she's not upset, I hope?'
'Joanna,' I said, 'looks a little like the angel off the top of the Christmas tree, but she's eminently modern and quite tough. She found it highly entertaining. Such things haven't come her way before.'
'I should hope not, indeed,' said Griffith warmly.
'And anyway,' I said firmly, 'that's the best way to take it, I think. As something utterly ridiculous.'
'Yes,' said Owen Griffith, 'only -'
He stopped, and I chimed in quickly.
'Quite so,' I said. 'Only is the word!'
'The trouble is,' he said, 'that this sort of thing, once it starts, grows.'
'So I should imagine.'
'It's pathological, of course.'
I nodded. 'Any idea who's behind it?' I asked.
'No, I wish I had. You see, the anonymous letter pest arises from one of two causes. Either it's particular – directed at one person or set of people, that is to say it's motivated, it's someone who's got a definite grudge (or thinks he has) and who chooses a particularly nasty and underhand way of working it off. It's mean and disgusting but it's not necessarily crazy, and it's usually fairly easy to trace the writer – a discharged servant, a jealous woman, and so on. But if it's general, and not particular, then it's more serious.
'The letters are sent indiscriminately and serve the purpose of working off some frustration in the writer's mind. As I say, it's definitely pathological. And the craze grows. In the end, of course, you track down the person in question – (it's often someone extremely unlikely) and that's that. There was a bad outburst of that kind over the other side of the county last year – turned out to be the head of the millinery department in a big draper's establishment. Quiet, refined woman – had been there for years.
'I remember something of the same kind in my last practice up north. But that turned out to be purely personal spite. Still, as I say, I've seen something of this kind of thing, and, quite frankly, it frightens me!'
'Has it been going on long?' I asked.
'I don't think so. Hard to say, of course, because people who get these letters don't go round advertising the fact. They put them in the fire.'
He paused.
'I've had one myself. Symmington, the solicitor, he's had one. And one or two of my poorer patients have told me about them.'
'All much the same sort of thing?'
'Oh, yes. A definite harping on the sex theme. That's always a feature.' He grinned. 'Symmington was accused of illicit relations with his lady clerk – poor old Miss Ginch, who's forty at least, with pince-nez and teeth like a rabbit. Symmington took it straight to the police. My letters accused me of violating professional decorum with my lady patients, stressing the details. They're all quite childish and absurd, but horribly venomous.' His face changed, grew grave. 'But all the same, I'm afraid. These things can be dangerous, you know.'
'I suppose they can.'
'You see,' he said, 'crude, childish-spite though it is, sooner or later one of these letters will hit the mark. And then, God knows what may happen! I'm afraid, too, of the effect upon the slow, suspicious, uneducated mind. If they see a thing written, they believe it's true. All sorts of complications may arise.'
'It was an illiterate sort of letter,' I said thoughtfully, 'written by somebody practically illiterate, I should say.'
'Was it?' said Owen and went away.
Thinking it over afterward, I found that 'Was it?' rather disturbing.
I am not going to pretend that the arrival of our anonymous letter did not leave a nasty taste in the mouth. It did. At the same time, it soon passed out of my mind. I did not, you see, at that point, take it seriously. I think I remember saying to myself that these things probably happen fairly often in out-of-the-way villages. Some hysterical woman with a taste for dramatising herself was probably at the bottom of it. Anyway, if the letters were as childish and silly as the one we had got, they couldn't do much harm.
The next incident, if I may put it so, occurred about a week later, when Partridge, her lips set tightly together, informed me that Beatrice, the daily help, would not be coming today.
'I gather, sir,' said Partridge, 'that the girl has been upset.'
I was not very sure what Partridge was implying, but I diagnosed (wrongly) some stomach trouble to which Partridge was too delicate to allude more directly. I said I was sorry and hoped she would soon be better.
'The girl is perfectly well, sir,' said Partridge. 'She is upset in her feelings.'
'Oh,' I said rather doubtfully.
'Owing,' went on Partridge, 'to a letter she has received. Making, I understand, insinuations.'
The grimness of Partridge's eye made me apprehensive that the insinuations were concerned with me. Since I could hardly have recognised Beatrice by sight if I had met her in the town, so unaware of her had I been, I felt a not unnatural annoyance. An invalid hobbling about on two sticks is hardly cast for the role of deceiver of village girls.
