The Moving Finger

‘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 afterwards, I found that ‘Was it?’ rather disturbing.

CHAPTER 2

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 dramatizing 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 stomachic 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, coupled with the obvious capital I of Insinuations, made me apprehensive that the insinuations were concerned with me. Since I would hardly have recognized 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. I said irritably:

‘What nonsense!’

‘My very words, sir, to the girl’s mother,’ said Partridge. ‘“Goings On in this house,” I said to her, “there never have been and never will be while I am in charge. As to Beatrice,” I said, “girls are different nowadays, and as to Goings On elsewhere I can say nothing.” But the truth is, sir, that Beatrice’s friend from the garage as she walks out with got one of them nasty letters too, and he isn’t acting reasonable at all.’

‘I have never heard anything so preposterous in my life,’ I said angrily.

‘It’s my opinion, sir,’ said Partridge, ‘that we’re well rid of the girl. What I say is, she wouldn’t take on so if there wasn’t something she didn’t want found out. No smoke without fire, that’s what I say.’

I had no idea how horribly tired I was going to get of that particular phrase.

That morning, by way of adventure, I was to walk down to the village. (Joanna and I always called it the village, although technically we were incorrect, and Lymstock would have been annoyed to hear us.)

The sun was shining, the air was cool and crisp with the sweetness of spring in it. I assembled my sticks and started off, firmly refusing to permit Joanna to accompany me.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I will not have a guardian angel teetering along beside me and uttering encouraging chirrups. A man travels fastest who travels alone, remember. I have much business to transact. I shall go to Galbraith, Galbraith and Symmington, and sign that transfer of shares, I shall call in at the baker’s and complain about the currant loaf, and I shall return that book we borrowed. I have to go to the bank, too. Let me away, woman, the morning is all too short.’

It was arranged that Joanna should pick me up with the car and drive me back up the hill in time for lunch.

‘That ought to give you time to pass the time of day with everyone in Lymstock.’

‘I have no doubt,’ I said, ‘that I shall have seen anybody who is anybody by then.’

For morning in the High Street was a kind of rendezvous for shoppers, when news was exchanged.

I did not, after all, walk down to the town unaccompanied. I had gone about two hundred yards, when I heard a bicycle bell behind me, then a scrunching of brakes, and then Megan Hunter more or less fell off her machine at my feet.

‘Hallo,’ she said breathlessly as she rose and dusted herself off.

I rather liked Megan and always felt oddly sorry for her.

She was Symmington the lawyer’s step-daughter, Mrs Symmington’s daughter by a first marriage. Nobody talked much about Mr (or Captain) Hunter, and I gathered that he was considered best forgotten. He was reported to have treated Mrs Symmington very badly. She had divorced him a year or two after the marriage. She was a woman with means of her own and had settled down with her little daughter in Lymstock ‘to forget’, and had eventually married the only eligible bachelor in the place, Richard Symmington. There were two boys of the second marriage to whom their parents were devoted, and I fancied that Megan sometimes felt odd man out in the establishment. She certainly did not resemble her mother, who was a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health.

Megan was a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpected charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle thread stockings with holes in them.

She looked, I decided this morning, much more like a horse than a human being. In fact she would have been a very nice horse with a little grooming.

She spoke, as usual, in a kind of breathless rush.

‘I’ve been up to the farm—you know, Lasher’s—to see if they’d got any duck’s eggs. They’ve got an awfully nice lot of little pigs. Sweet! Do you like pigs? I do. I even like the smell.’

‘Well-kept pigs shouldn’t smell,’ I said.

‘Shouldn’t they? They all do round here. Are you walking down to the town? I saw you were alone, so I thought I’d stop and walk with you, only I stopped rather suddenly.’

‘You’ve torn your stocking,’ I said.

Megan looked rather ruefully at her right leg.

‘So I have. But it’s got two holes already, so it doesn’t matter very much, does it?’

‘Don’t you ever mend your stockings, Megan?’

‘Rather. When Mummy catches me. But she doesn’t notice awfully what I do—so it’s lucky in a way, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t seem to realize you’re grown up,’ I said.

‘You mean I ought to be more like your sister? All dolled up?’

I rather resented this description of Joanna.

‘She looks clean and tidy and pleasing to the eye,’ I said.

‘She’s awfully pretty,’ said Megan. ‘She isn’t a bit like you, is she? Why not?’

‘Brothers and sisters aren’t always alike.’

‘No. Of course. I’m not very like Brian or Colin. And Brian and Colin aren’t like each other.’ She paused and said, ‘It’s very rum, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’

Megan replied briefly: ‘Families.’

I said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose they are.’

I wondered just what was passing in her mind. We walked on in silence for a moment or two, then Megan said in a rather shy voice:

‘You fly, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s how you got hurt?’

‘Yes, I crashed.’

Megan said:

‘Nobody down here flies.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I suppose not. Would you like to fly, Megan?’

‘Me?’ Megan seemed surprised. ‘Goodness, no. I should be sick. I’m sick in a train even.’

She paused, and then asked with that directness which only a child usually displays:

‘Will you get all right and be able to fly again, or will you always be a bit of a crock?’

‘My doctor says I shall be quite all right.’

‘Yes, but is he the kind of man who tells lies?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘In fact, I’m quite sure of it. I trust him.’

‘That’s all right then. But a lot of people do tell lies.’

I accepted this undeniable statement of fact in silence.

Megan said in a detached judicial kind of way:

‘I’m glad. I was afraid you looked bad tempered because you were crocked up for life—but if it’s just natural, it’s different.’

‘I’m not bad tempered,’ I said coldly.

‘Well, irritable, then.’

‘I’m irritable because I’m in a hurry to get fit again—and these things can’t be hurried.’

‘Then why fuss?’

I began to laugh.

‘My dear girl, aren’t you ever in a hurry for things to happen?’

Megan considered the question. She said:

‘No. Why should I be? There’s nothing to be in a hurry about. Nothing ever happens.’

I was struck by something forlorn in the words. I said gently: ‘What do you do with yourself down here?’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘What is there to do?’

‘Haven’t you got any hobbies? Do you play games? Have you got friends round about?’

‘I’m stupid at games. And I don’t like them much. There aren’t many girls round here, and the ones there are I don’t like. They think I’m awful.’

‘Nonsense. Why should they?’

Megan shook her head.

‘Didn’t you go to school at all?’

‘Yes, I came back a year ago.’

‘Did you enjoy school?’

‘It wasn’t bad. They taught you things in an awfully silly way, though.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well—just bits and pieces. Chopping and changing from one thing to the other. It was a cheap school, you know, and the teachers weren’t very good. They could never answer questions properly.’

‘Very few teachers can,’ I said.

‘Why not? They ought to.’

I agreed.

‘Of course I’m pretty stupid,’ said Megan. ‘And such a lot of things seem to me such rot. History, for instance. Why, it’s quite different out of different books!’

‘That is its real interest,’ I said.

‘And grammar,’ went on Megan. ‘And silly compositions. And all the blathering stuff Shelley wrote, twittering on about skylarks, and Wordsworth going all potty over some silly daffodils. And Shakespeare.’

‘What’s wrong with Shakespeare?’ I inquired with interest.

‘Twisting himself up to say things in such a difficult way that you can’t get at what he means. Still, I like some Shakespeare.’

‘He would be gratified to know that, I’m sure,’ I said.

Megan suspected no sarcasm. She said, her face lighting up:

‘I like Goneril and Regan, for instance.’

‘Why these two?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. They’re satisfactory, somehow. Why do you think they were like that?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like they were. I mean something must have made them like that?’

For the first time I wondered. I had always accepted Lear’s elder daughters as two nasty bits of goods and had let it go at that. But Megan’s demand for a first cause interested me.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter. I just wondered. Anyway, it’s only English Literature, isn’t it?’

‘Quite, quite. Wasn’t there any subject you enjoyed?’

‘Only Maths.’

‘Maths?’ I said, rather surprised.

Megan’s face had lit up.

‘I loved Maths. But it wasn’t awfully well taught. I’d like to be taught Maths really well. It’s heavenly. I think there’s something heavenly about numbers, anyway, don’t you?’

‘I’ve never felt it,’ I said truthfully.

We were now entering the High Street. Megan said sharply:

‘Here’s Miss Griffith. Hateful woman.’

‘Don’t you like her?’

‘I loathe her. She’s always at me to join her foul Guides. I hate Guides. Why dress yourself up and go about in clumps, and put badges on yourself for something you haven’t really learnt to do properly? I think it’s all rot.’

On the whole, I rather agreed with Megan. But Miss Griffith had descended on us before I could voice my assent.

The doctor’s sister, who rejoiced in the singularly inappropriate name of Aimée, had all the positive assurance that her brother lacked. She was a handsome woman in a masculine weather-beaten way, with a deep hearty voice.

‘Hallo, you two,’ she bayed at us. ‘Gorgeous morning, isn’t it? Megan, you’re just the person I wanted to see. I want some help addressing envelopes for the Conservative Association.’

Megan muttered something elusive, propped up her bicycle against the kerb and dived in a purposeful way into the International Stores.

‘Extraordinary child,’ said Miss Griffith, looking after her. ‘Bone lazy. Spends her time mooning about. Must be a great trial to poor Mrs Symmington. I know her mother’s tried more than once to get her to take up something—shorthand-typing, you know, or cookery, or keeping Angora rabbits. She needs an interest in life.’

I thought that was probably true, but felt that in Megan’s place I should have withstood firmly any of Aimée Griffith’s suggestions for the simple reason that her aggressive personality would have put my back up.

‘I don’t believe in idleness,’ went on Miss Griffith. ‘And certainly not for young people. It’s not as though Megan was pretty or attractive or anything like that. Sometimes I think the girl’s half-witted. A great disappointment to her mother. The father, you know,’ she lowered her voice slightly, ‘was definitely a wrong ’un. Afraid the child takes after him. Painful for her mother. Oh, well, it takes all sorts to make a world, that’s what I say.’

‘Fortunately,’ I responded.

Aimée Griffith gave a ‘jolly’ laugh.

‘Yes, it wouldn’t do if we were all made to one pattern. But I don’t like to see anyone not getting all they can out of life. I enjoy life myself and I want everyone to enjoy it too. People say to me you must be bored to death living down there in the country all the year round. Not a bit of it, I say. I’m always busy, always happy! There’s always something going on in the country. My time’s taken up, what with my Guides, and the Institute and various committees—to say nothing of looking after Owen.’

At this minute, Miss Griffith saw an acquaintance on the other side of the street, and uttering a bay of recognition she leaped across the road, leaving me free to pursue my course to the bank.

I always found Miss Griffith rather overwhelming, though I admired her energy and vitality, and it was pleasant to see the beaming contentment with her lot in life which she always displayed, and which was a pleasant contrast to the subdued complaining murmurs of so many women.

My business at the bank transacted satisfactorily, I went on to the offices of Messrs Galbraith, Galbraith and Symmington. I don’t know if there were any Galbraiths extant. I never saw any. I was shown into Richard Symmington’s inner office which had the agreeable mustiness of a long-established legal firm.

Vast numbers of deed boxes, labelled Lady Hope, Sir Everard Carr, William Yatesby-Hoares, Esq., Deceased, etc., gave the required atmosphere of decorous county families and legitimate long-established business.

Studying Mr Symmington as he bent over the documents I had brought, it occurred to me that if Mrs Symmington had encountered disaster in her first marriage, she had certainly played safe in her second. Richard Symmington was the acme of calm respectability, the sort of man who would never give his wife a moment’s anxiety. A long neck with a pronounced Adam’s apple, a slightly cadaverous face and a long thin nose. A kindly man, no doubt, a good husband and father, but not one to set the pulses madly racing.

Presently Mr Symmington began to speak. He spoke clearly and slowly, delivering himself of much good sense and shrewd acumen. We settled the matter in hand and I rose to go, remarking as I did so:

‘I walked down the hill with your step-daughter.’

For a moment Mr Symmington looked as though he did not know who his step-daughter was, then he smiled.

‘Oh yes, of course, Megan. She—er—has been back from school some time. We’re thinking about finding her something to do—yes, to do. But of course she’s very young still. And backward for her age, so they say. Yes, so they tell me.’

I went out. In the outer office was a very old man on a stool writing slowly and laboriously, a small cheeky-looking boy and a middle-aged woman with frizzy hair and pince-nez who was typing with some speed and dash.

If this was Miss Ginch I agreed with Owen Griffith that tender passages between her and her employer were exceedingly unlikely.

I went into the baker’s and said my piece about the currant loaf. It was received with the exclamation and incredulity proper to the occasion, and a new currant loaf was thrust upon me in replacement—‘fresh from the oven this minute’—as its indecent heat pressed against my chest proclaimed to be no less than truth.

I came out of the shop and looked up and down the street hoping to see Joanna with the car. The walk had tired me a good deal and it was awkward getting along with my sticks and the currant loaf.

But there was no sign of Joanna as yet.

Suddenly my eyes were held in glad and incredulous surprise.

Along the pavement towards me there came floating a goddess. There is really no other word for it.

The perfect features, the crisply curling golden hair, the tall exquisitely shaped body! And she walked like a goddess, without effort, seeming to swim nearer and nearer. A glorious, an incredible, a breath-taking girl!

In my intense excitement something had to go. What went was the currant loaf. It slipped from my clutches. I made a dive after it and lost my stick, which clattered to the pavement, and I slipped and nearly fell myself.

It was the strong arm of the goddess that caught and held me. I began to stammer:

‘Th-thanks awfully, I’m f-f-frightfully sorry.’

She had retrieved the currant loaf and handed it to me together with the stick. And then she smiled kindly and said cheerfully:

‘Don’t mention it. No trouble, I assure you,’ and the magic died completely before the flat, competent voice.

A nice healthy-looking well set-up girl, no more.

I fell to reflecting what would have happened if the Gods had given Helen of Troy exactly those flat accents. How strange that a girl could trouble your inmost soul so long as she kept her mouth shut, and that the moment she spoke the glamour could vanish as though it had never been.

I had known the reverse happen, though. I had seen a little sad monkey-faced woman whom no one would turn to look at twice. Then she opened her mouth and suddenly enchantment had lived and bloomed and Cleopatra had cast her spell anew.

Joanna had drawn up at the kerb beside me without my noticing her arrival. She asked if there was anything the matter.

‘Nothing,’ I said, pulling myself together. ‘I was reflecting on Helen of Troy and others.’

‘What a funny place to do it,’ said Joanna. ‘You looked most odd, standing there clasping currant bread to your breast with your mouth wide open.’

‘I’ve had a shock,’ I said. ‘I have been transplanted to Ilium and back again.

‘Do you know who that is?’ I added, indicating a retreating back that was swimming gracefully away.

Peering after the girl Joanna said that it was the Symmingtons’ nursery governess.

‘Is that what struck you all of a heap?’ she asked. ‘She’s good-looking, but a bit of a wet fish.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Just a nice kind girl. And I’d been thinking her Aphrodite.’

Joanna opened the door of the car and I got in.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Some people have lots of looks and absolutely no S.A. That girl has. It seems such a pity.’

I said that if she was a nursery governess it was probably just as well.

CHAPTER 3

That afternoon we went to tea with Mr Pye.

Mr Pye was an extremely ladylike plump little man, devoted to his petit point chairs, his Dresden shepherdesses and his collection of bric-à-brac. He lived at Prior’s Lodge in the grounds of which were the ruins of the old Priory.

Prior’s Lodge was certainly a very exquisite house and under Mr Pye’s loving care it showed to its best advantage. Every piece of furniture was polished and set in the exact place most suited to it. The curtains and cushions were of exquisite tone and colour, and of the most expensive silks.

It was hardly a man’s house, and it did strike me that to live there would be rather like taking up one’s abode in a period room at a museum. Mr Pye’s principal enjoyment in life was taking people round his house. Even those completely insensitive to their surroundings could not escape. Even if you were so hardened as to consider the essentials of living a radio, a cocktail bar, a bath and a bed surrounded by the necessary walls. Mr Pye did not despair of leading you to better things.

His small plump hands quivered with sensibility as he described his treasures, and his voice rose to a falsetto squeak as he narrated the exciting circumstances under which he had brought his Italian bedstead home from Verona.

Joanna and I being both fond of antiquities and of period furniture, met with approval.

‘It is really a pleasure, a great pleasure, to have such an acquisition to our little community. The dear good people down here, you know, so painfully bucolic—not to say provincial. They don’t know anything. Vandals—absolute vandals! And the inside of their houses—it would make you weep, dear lady, I assure you it would make you weep. Perhaps it has done so?’

Joanna said that she hadn’t gone quite as far as that.

‘But you see what I mean? They mix things so terribly! I’ve seen with my own eyes a most delightful little Sheraton piece—delicate, perfect—a collector’s piece, absolutely—and next to it a Victorian occasional table, or quite possibly a fumed oak revolving bookcase—yes, even that—fumed oak.’

He shuddered—and murmured plaintively:

‘Why are people so blind? You agree—I’m sure you agree, that beauty is the only thing worth living for.’

Hypnotized by his earnestness, Joanna said, yes, yes, that was so.

‘Then why,’ demanded Mr Pye, ‘do people surround themselves with ugliness?’

Joanna said it was very odd.

‘Odd? It’s criminal! That’s what I call it—criminal! And the excuses they give! They say something is comfortable. Or that it is quaint. Quaint! Such a horrible word.’

‘The house you have taken,’ went on Mr Pye, ‘Miss Emily Barton’s house. Now that is charming, and she has some quite nice pieces. Quite nice. One or two of them are really first class. And she has taste, too—although I’m not quite so sure of that as I was. Sometimes, I am afraid, I think it’s really sentiment. She likes to keep things as they were—but not for le bon motif—not because of the resultant harmony—but because it is the way her mother had them.’