The Moving Finger Read online

  “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—somebody 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 ’alf! And that, I may say, is a Bowdlerized 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—”

  “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 particular person or set of people, that is to say it’s motivated, it’s someone who’s got a definite grudge (or thinks they have) 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 the 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 afterwards, I found that “Was it?” rather disturbing.

  Two

  I

  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.

  II

  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 stepdaughter, 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 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.”