II

I see that I have begun badly. I have given no description of Lymstock andwithout understanding what Lymstock is like, it is impossible to under-stand my story.

To begin with, Lymstock has its roots in the past. Somewhere about thetime of the Norman Conquest, Lymstock was a place of importance. Thatimportance was chiefly ecclesiastical. Lymstock had a priory, and it had along succession of ambitious and powerful priors. Lords and barons in thesurrounding countryside made themselves right with Heaven by leavingcertain of their lands to the priory. Lymstock Priory waxed rich and im-portant and was a power in the land for many centuries. In due course,however, Henry the Eighth caused it to share the fate of its contemporar-ies. From then on a castle dominated the town. It was still important. Ithad rights and privileges and wealth.

And then, somewhere in seventeen hundred and something, the tide ofprogress swept Lymstock into a backwater. The castle crumbled. Neitherrailways nor main roads came near Lymstock. It turned into a little pro-vincial market town, unimportant and forgotten, with a sweep of moor-land rising behind it, and placid farms and fields ringing it round.

A market was held there once a week, on which day one was apt to en-counter cattle in the lanes and roads. It had a small race meeting twice ayear which only the most obscure horses attended. It had a charming HighStreet with dignified houses set flat back, looking slightly incongruouswith their ground-floor windows displaying buns or vegetables or fruit. Ithad a long straggling draper’s shop, a large and portentous ironmonger’s,a pretentious post office, and a row of straggly indeterminate shops, tworival butchers and an International Stores. It had a doctor, a firm of solicit-ors, Messrs. Galbraith, Galbraith and Symmington, a beautiful and unex-pectedly large church dating from fourteen hundred and twenty, withsome Saxon remains incorporated in it, a new and hideous school, andtwo pubs.

Such was Lymstock, and urged on by Emily Barton, anybody who wasanybody came to call upon us, and in due course Joanna, having bought apair of gloves and assumed a velvet beret rather the worse for wear, sal-lied forth to return them.

To us, it was all quite novel and entertaining. We were not there for life.

It was, for us, an interlude. I prepared to obey my doctor’s instructionsand get interested in my neighbours.

Joanna and I found it all great fun.

I remembered, I suppose, Marcus Kent’s instructions to enjoy the localscandals. I certainly didn’t suspect how these scandals were going to be in-troduced to my notice.

The odd part of it was that the letter, when it came, amused us morethan anything else.

It arrived, I remember, at breakfast. I turned it over, in the idle way onedoes when time goes slowly and every event must be spun out to its fullextent. It was, I saw, a local letter with a typewritten address.

I opened it before the two with London postmarks, since one of themwas a bill and the other from a rather tiresome cousin.

Inside, printed words and letters had been cut out and gummed to asheet of paper. For a minute or two I stared at the words without takingthem in. Then I gasped.

Joanna, who was frowning over some bills, looked up.

“Hallo,” she said, “what is it? You look quite startled.”

The letter, using terms of the coarsest character, expressed the writer’sopinion that Joanna and I were not brother and sister.

“It’s a particularly foul anonymous letter,” I said.

I was still suffering from shock. Somehow one didn’t expect that kind ofthing in the placid backwater of Lymstock.

Joanna at once displayed lively interest.

“No? What does it say?”

In novels, I have noticed, anonymous letters of a foul and disgustingcharacter are never shown, if possible, to women. It is implied that wo-men must at all cost be shielded from the shock it might give their delicatenervous systems.

I am sorry to say it never occurred to me not to show the letter toJoanna. I handed it to her at once.

She vindicated my belief in her toughness by displaying no emotion butthat of amusement.

“What an awful bit of dirt! I’ve always heard about anonymous letters,but I’ve never seen one before. Are they always like this?”

“I can’t tell you,” I said. “It’s my first experience, too.”

Joanna began to giggle.

“You must have been right about my makeup, Jerry. I suppose theythink I just must be an abandoned female!”

“That,” I said, “coupled with the fact that our father was a tall, dark lan-tern-jawed man and our mother a fair-haired blue-eyed little creature,and that I take after him and you take after her.”

Joanna nodded thoughtfully.

“Yes, we’re not a bit alike. Nobody would take us for brother and sister.”

“Somebody certainly hasn’t,” I said with feeling.

Joanna said she thought it was frightfully funny.

She dangled the letter thoughtfully by one corner and asked what wewere to do with it.

“The correct procedure, I believe,” I said, “is to drop it into the fire witha sharp exclamation of disgust.”

I suited the action to the word, and Joanna applauded.

“You did that beautifully,” she added. “You ought to have been on thestage. It’s lucky we still have fires, isn’t it?”

“The wastepaper basket would have been much less dramatic,” I agreed.

“I could, of course, have set light to it with a match and slowly watched itburn—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 towards the window. Then, standing there, sheturned 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’tknow when I come to think of it that it is so funny after all. You know, Ithought they—they liked us down here.”

“So they do,” I said. “This is just some half-crazy brain on the border-line.”

“I suppose so. Ugh— Nasty!”

As she went out into the sunshine I thought to myself as I smoked myafter-breakfast cigarette that she was quite right. It was nasty. Someoneresented our coming here—someone resented Joanna’s bright young soph-isticated beauty—somebody wanted to hurt. To take it with a laugh wasperhaps the best way—but deep down it wasn’t funny….

Dr. Griffith came that morning. I had fixed up for him to give me aweekly overhaul. I liked Owen Griffith. He was dark, ungainly, with awk-ward ways of moving and deft, very gentle hands. He had a jerky way oftalking 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 underthe weather this morning?”

“Not really,” I said. “A particularly scurrilous anonymous letter arrivedwith 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 asstrangers was resented here.”

“No, no, it’s nothing to do with that. It’s just—” He paused and thenasked, “What did it say? At least—” he turned suddenly red and embar-rassed— “perhaps I oughtn’t to ask?”

“I’ll tell you with pleasure,” I said. “It just said that the fancy tart I’dbrought down with me wasn’t my sister—not ’alf! And that, I may say, is aBowdlerized 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 Christmastree, but she’s eminently modern and quite tough. She found it highly en-tertaining. 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. Assomething utterly ridiculous.”

“Yes,” said Owen Griffith. “Only—”

“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 oftwo causes. Either it’s particular—directed at one particular person or setof people, that is to say it’s motivated, it’s someone who’s got a definitegrudge (or thinks they have) and who chooses a particularly nasty and un-derhand way of working it off. It’s mean and disgusting but it’s not neces-sarily crazy, and it’s usually fairly easy to trace the writer—a dischargedservant, a jealous woman—and so on. But if it’s general, and not particu-lar, then it’s more serious. The letters are sent indiscriminately and servethe 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, youtrack down the person in question—it’s often someone extremely unlikely,and that’s that. There was a bad outburst of the kind over the other side ofthe county last year—turned out to be the head of the millinery depart-ment in a big draper’s establishment. Quiet, refined woman—had beenthere for years. I remember something of the same kind in my last prac-tice up north—but that turned out to be purely personal spite. Still, as Isay, I’ve seen something of this kind of thing, and, quite frankly, it fright-ens me!”

“Has it been going on long?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. Hard to say, of course, because people who get theseletters 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 oneor 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 ladyclerk—poor old Miss Ginch, who’s forty at least, with pince-nez and teethlike a rabbit. Symmington took it straight to the police. My letters accusedme of violating professional decorum with my lady patients, stressing thedetails. They’re all quite childish and absurd, but horribly venomous.” Hisface changed, grew grave. “But all the same, I’m afraid. These things canbe dangerous, you know.”

“I suppose they can.”

“You see,” he said, “crude, childish spite though it is, sooner or later oneof 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. Ifthey see a thing written, they believe it’s true. All sorts of complicationsmay arise.”

“It was an illiterate sort of letter,” I said thoughtfully, “written by some-body practically illiterate, I should say.”

“Was it?” said Owen, and went away.

Thinking it over afterwards, I found that “Was it?” rather disturbing.