Seven

I
When I got home I found Mrs. Dane Calthrop sitting talking to Joanna. Shelooked, I thought, grey and ill.

“This has been a terrible shock to me, Mr. Burton,” she said. “Poor thing,poor thing.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s awful to think of someone being driven to the stage oftaking their own life.”

“Oh, you mean Mrs. Symmington?”

“Didn’t you?”

Mrs. Dane Calthrop shook her head.

“Of course one is sorry for her, but it would have been bound to happenanyway, wouldn’t it?”

“Would it?” said Joanna dryly.

Mrs. Dane Calthrop turned to her.

“Oh, I think so, dear. If suicide is your idea of escape from trouble thenit doesn’t very much matter what the trouble is. Whenever some very un-pleasant shock had to be faced, she’d have done the same thing. What itreally comes down to is that she was that kind of woman. Not that onewould have guessed it. She always seemed to me a selfish rather stupidwoman, with a good firm hold on life. Not the kind to panic, you wouldthink—but I’m beginning to realize how little I really know anyone.”

“I’m still curious as to whom you meant when you said ‘Poor thing,’” Iremarked.

She stared at me.

“The woman who wrote the letters, of course.”

“I don’t think,” I said dryly, “I shall waste sympathy on her.”

Mrs. Dane Calthrop leaned forward. She laid a hand on my knee.

“But don’t you realize—can’t you feel? Use your imagination. Think howdesperately, violently unhappy anyone must be to sit down and writethese things. How lonely, how cut off from human kind. Poisoned throughand through, with a dark stream of poison that finds its outlet in this way.

That’s why I feel so self- reproachful. Somebody in this town has beenracked with that terrible unhappiness, and I’ve had no idea of it. I shouldhave had. You can’t interfere with actions— I never do. But that black in-ward unhappiness—like a septic arm physically, all black and swollen. Ifyou could cut it and let the poison out it would flow away harmlessly. Yes,poor soul, poor soul.”

She got up to go.

I did not feel like agreeing with her. I had no sympathy for our anonym-ous letter writer whatsoever. But I did ask curiously:

“Have you any idea at all, Mrs. Calthrop, who this woman is?”

She turned her fine perplexed eyes on me.

“Well, I can guess,” she said. “But then I might be wrong, mightn’t I?”

She went swiftly out through the door, popping her head back to ask:

“Do tell me, why have you never married, Mr. Burton?”

In anyone else it would have been an impertinence, but with Mrs. DaneCalthrop you felt that the idea had suddenly come into her head and shehad really wanted to know.

“Shall we say,” I said, rallying, “that I have never met the right woman?”

“We can say so,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, “but it wouldn’t be a verygood answer, because so many men have obviously married the wrongwoman.”

This time she really departed.

Joanna said:

“You know I really do think she’s mad. But I like her. The people in thevillage here are afraid of her.”

“So am I, a little.”

“Because you never know what’s coming next?”

“Yes. And there’s a careless brilliancy about her guesses.”

Joanna said slowly: “Do you really think whoever wrote these letters isvery unhappy?”

“I don’t know what the damned hag is thinking or feeling! And I don’tcare. It’s her victims I’m sorry for.”

It seems odd to me now that in our speculations about Poison Pen’sframe of mind, we missed the most obvious one. Griffith had pictured heras possibly exultant. I had envisaged her as remorseful—appalled by theresult of her handiwork. Mrs. Dane Calthrop had seen her as suffering.

Yet the obvious, the inevitable reaction we did not consider—or perhapsI should say, I did not consider. That reaction was Fear.

For with the death of Mrs. Symmington, the letters had passed out ofone category into another. I don’t know what the legal position was—Sym-mington knew, I suppose, but it was clear that with a death resulting, theposition of the writer of the letters was much more serious. There couldnow be no question of passing it off as a joke if the identity of the writerwas discovered. The police were active, a Scotland Yard expert called in. Itwas vital now for the anonymous author to remain anonymous.

And granted that Fear was the principal reaction, other things followed.

Those possibilities also I was blind to. Yet surely they should have beenobvious.