MISS LETTICE
NEEDING some stakes for my new fruit trees, I called on Saunders, who knows everything, to ask him where they could be obtained. Saunders is something more than a rector: he is a shepherd of souls. He has an extraordinary capacity for listening, and listening, he tells me (without any irony), is the most important of his duties—far more important than preaching church doctrine Sunday by Sunday. This is fortunate, for in my belief Saunders’s orthodoxy would not survive a very minute scrutiny. The villagers go to him with their most secret troubles, their most lurid sins, and come away with hearts eased, comforted by a platitude or two or by wordless sympathy. His mind must be quite a filing-cabinet of what are called human documents. With so much silent listening to do, perhaps he finds me as useful as I find him interesting; for I am always willing, when he is with me, to keep my ears open and my mouth shut. He is a good talker but not a garrulous one: it is the things he leaves unsaid, or half-unsaid, that interest me most in his discourse.
As I had expected, he put me at once in the way of getting my stakes. ‘Bowers, of Yew Tree Farm, is the best man. He’s a good fellow, Bowers. For your own soul’s sake you’ll have to keep an eye on his charges: they’re generally much too low. Yew Tree Farm—you know the place? It’s not really a farm at all: it’s a ramshackle wooden house standing by the side of a timber-yard. Near poor Miss Lettice’s cottage.’
‘Why do you call her poor?’ I asked. For Saunders was not in the habit of using that epithet without cause.
‘Ah, haven’t you heard? She has been taken away, you know. You spend too much time among those books of yours, my friend. Why, it happened over a week ago. Pitiful affair. She lapsed suddenly into a kind of grotesque babyhood.’
I can never hear of such an event without shuddering. ‘But she wasn’t an aged woman!’ Already one spoke of her in the past tense as of the dead.
‘She was fifty-eight,’ said Saunders; and though genuinely shocked by the disaster I couldn’t help being amused for a moment by the exactness of his information—it was so characteristic of him that he knew the woman’s age to a year. ‘No,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t the sort of thing that should happen in the ordinary course of nature.’
‘She had some shock,’ I suggested.
Saunders nodded. ‘The most cruel shock.’
‘And you no doubt were in her confidence,’ I insinuated.
Observing the curiosity that I tried politely to dissemble, he looked at me for one silent moment and smiled. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. You’re a discreet fellow, and if you weren’t such a misguided heretic I could find it in my heart to like you. Well, the cause of Miss Lettice’s collapse was a psychological phenomenon that has a very old-fashioned name.’
I waited for him to go on.
‘A broken heart,’ said Saunders. ‘Miss Lettice is the victim of a hopeless passion.’
‘A hopeless passion,’ I protested, ‘at fifty-eight!’
Saunders drew his left hand from his jacket pocket and with it a pouchful of tobacco, which he tossed into my lap. ‘You’re not in a hurry for ten minutes?’
I am never in a hurry when Saunders settles down into his chair with that air of pensive reminiscence; so, when we had both got our pipes going, he told me the story.