Good by Stealth

A Golden Age Mystery

Henrietta Clandon

• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781913054885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

The real trouble was, as I see since, that people do not discriminate. They lump all cases of what they consider a like nature together, and to their ill-informed minds I was in the same category as a mentally unsound woman who posts disgusting anonymous letters to her neighbours.

Miss Edna Alice is a lady of moral rectitude and many other outstanding virtues. At least this is her own, strongly-held view—not all others agree. This novel is her personal account of how, more sinned against than sinning, she sets about improving the characters and atmosphere in a small English village, essaying many forms of artistic, political and sporting endeavour along the way. Subsequently, and unbelievably, she finds herself a convicted prisoner, accused of writing numerous poison pen letters to her neighbours. The result is one of the most unusual and funny crime novels to have emerged from the golden age.

Good by Stealth was first published in 1936. This new edition features an introduction by Curtis Evans.

“A gift for irony in the depiction of the criminal’s mind.” Sunday Times

“Henrietta Clandon’s novels are always welcome. She has developed a style of her own in crime fiction.” Anthony Berkeley

CHAPTER I

I came out of jail ten months ago, and have been occupied since then in writing the story of the latter part of my life, before malicious people, and an absurd verdict, unjustly deprived me of my liberty.

Yes, for twelve long months. It was the Second Division, they said. If I have come through it unscathed, and am still able to hold my head high, it is not that I did not detest the place, and the people, where I was confined. The wardresses were common women, and the prisoners, with one exception, vulgar girls, with no sense of decency or respect.

I am not writing an attack on British law, or an apology for my life. I leave the latter to others, who cannot say to themselves that from first to last their conduct was governed by a desire to do the right thing, and—what is much harder—to make other people do the right thing.

Before I go any further, I wish to make it clear that I had no pious desires to make other people better. As you will see later, the local vicar and the Nonconformist minister gave assistance to the prosecution. So it was foolish for the incompetent man who defended me to plead at the end of the case that I was suffering from religious mania. But all my life I have demanded right and justice, with the result you see.

“What do you mean by right?” I remember the stuffy old judge said, when I made this remark in court. “Your rights, or what you conceive to be your rights, or something for the general good? I may remark, Miss Alice, that there is some confusion between right and rights.”

Silly old man! How can I govern my life by what seems right to others? Extravagant as the claim sounds, one of the witnesses against me said he thought it quite right to hit my dog. And a boor in court called out: “Damn’ well right!” I am glad to say that he was turned out. But I shall come to that later. My point is that each of us knows what he himself should do. Can he be blamed if he does it?

But to return to the prison where I spent an unhappy twelve months. Vulgar and ignorant as the bulk of my fellow prisoners were, I had thought—absurdly, of course, since they had obviously done wrong—that they would see that I, at least, was a victim of persecution, one born before her time.

Not a bit of it. They each and all assumed that I was there for a very good reason. Opportunities for talking are infrequent in prisons. I thought that a hardship at first, but not for long. To one particularly vicious young woman, who, I heard, had stolen from shops, I had to protest that I was the victim of popular malice. I remember to this day her nasty, sneering laugh.

“Then what did you write those dirty letters for?” she asked, and giggled again at my shocked expression.

It showed me clearly that the vulgar mind is incapable of understanding the refined one, or, to put it in the vernacular: “What can you expect of a pig but a grunt?”

Dirty letters! There showed the essential obscenity of the common mind. I never wrote a single letter which contained an expression calculated to bring a blush to the cheek of youth. I said so to the brute who prosecuted me. He tucked up the tail of his gown in the silly fashion barristers have, and said that I had still left myself considerable scope, as things went nowadays.

Between a prosecutor who made these would-be witty debating points, and the foolish old man on the Bench, who talked to me in an impertinently fatherly way, I had a most unpleasant time.

“Come, come, Miss Alice,” the latter said once—my name is Edna Alice, by the way—“if your intentions were such as you suggest, would it not have been fairer and juster for you to append your signature to these communications?”

Now wasn’t that an odd thing for an educated and apparently intelligent man to say? Either he was trying to trap me, or he was overlooking the fact that signing my name would have got me into trouble just the same. I mean to say, people resent being made to do the right thing, and the only way to escape their mean vengeance is to omit your name when you write.

They can’t expect to have it both ways.

After the first month in prison I decided to keep to myself, and did so bravely. I noticed after that that neither the prisoners nor wardresses forced their presence or speech on me. Not directly, at least; though I heard one fair-minded girl say that it wasn’t fair putting me in jail with them. She is the exception to the rule of which I wrote just now. She made the other women laugh, though I do not know why.

The real trouble was, as I see since, that people do not discriminate. They lump all cases of what they consider a like nature together, and to their ill-informed minds I was in the same category as a mentally unsound woman who posts disgusting anonymous letters to her neighbours.

“You were trying, in fact,” said the prosecutor, with a sneer, “to do good by stealth?”

“Yes,” I said cuttingly. “If you have any record, sir, of doing good, either openly or by stealth, I shall be glad to hear it. So far, I only know you as a so-called man who attacks defenceless women.”

If he had been a man of decency and refinement, he would have felt crushed. But it was too much to expect. He had obviously been picked for his venom by the crowd of spiteful people who initiated the prosecution. He even dared to laugh.

“Indeed, madam,” he said, “it strikes me that you were not only in the possession of a deadly and cutting weapon, but you also found occasion to use it behind other people’s backs. It was not a duel, shall I suggest, but verbal murder.”

The judge pulled him up for that. It was the only time when he showed a grain of sense, and I am sure that if the age of judges is ever put to the vote, I shall be all in favour of a retiring age of fifty-five.

“I suggest,” I replied with spirit, in face of some disgusting laughter in court, “that whatever weapon I used, I had occasion to use it.”

“And used it with force, if not discretion,” he said.

Of the busybodies and officious witnesses, I am sure the vicar and the Nonconformist parson were the worst. I had never attended their places of worship. I had never tried to make either of them do right, though I am sure I might have tried. In spite of that, they both came forward and said I had sent them letters charging members of their congregations with various things.

But there you are. Officious people will not mind their own business. They seemed as angry as if I had written to their parishioners charging them with something. Frankly, I could not understand their conduct.

When I had heard the sentence, I was not as crushed as the people in court hoped. Technically, I knew myself to be at fault, but everything is in intention, and my intentions had been blameless from the start. I wish I could believe it of the motives of the two clergymen who came forward to help my persecutors.

The chief blow came later. I was not to be allowed to have my dear dog, Tiblits, accompany me.

If it were nothing else but that, the savagery and cruelty of British law was shown up to be what it was. To dog-lovers like myself (real dog-lovers; not those who keep dogs, and even beat them at times), to lack one’s dog is to miss everything that makes life dear. But I find that only a few people, the richer, choicer souls, love dogs. Most people love their fellows better; which is an extraordinary thing to me.

I wasn’t asking that Tiblits should be treated luxuriously, or expensively; only that he should share my prison cell and prison fare. He would have been happy, and so should I, so you can imagine my horror when that dreadful old man, the judge, remarked that prison was supposed to be a form of punishment. As if Tiblits had done anything to deserve it.

He hardly knew me when I came out and went to fetch him. He had been “boarded out” with a dreadful woman, and there was no doubt that she had done her best to take his affections from me.

But there is no use going back on all that. I have come to accept the fact that the majority of people are callous and unsympathetic when they come in contact with those more sensitive and subtle than themselves. I suppose they feel a kind of inferiority secretly, and express it by harshness and cruelty.

We who cultivate an inner life have to be studied in the surroundings of our youth to be understood. We grow so much in that formative period. We are formed characters at an age when the common herd is still unshapen clay, if you know what I mean.

So I hope you won’t feel bored if I tell you something of my father and mother. I am rather like them, I think; a little bit of each, and I do fervently believe in heredity.

My father was originally a very considerable land-owner. When I was born he had a very large and profitable rent-roll. Generations of independence had made him conscious of his rights, and he had, like me, a strong sense of justice.

It was that, I may say, which led gradually to a decline in our fortunes. At thirteen, I was sent to an expensive boarding-school; at seventeen, I had to leave it. I was taken away for reasons of economy.

The longer I live the more I see that people with a strong sense of justice are like geniuses. They run, as dear father used to say, very few to the acre. So it was perhaps natural that, in the county where we lived, most of our neighbours were narrow-minded, one-sided folk. They only considered their own interests.

As these interests very often clashed with ours—or, I should say, with my father’s—he was unfortunately compelled to consult his lawyer, and, often, to take action to bring them to their senses.

But law is expensive, and we seemed to have a knack (though my logical father persisted that it was just chance) of having our cases decided by pig-headed, or prejudiced, juries. But father would never give up. Strong in his sense of right, he would take a case from one court to another; never realising, poor dear, that he was dealing with the same type of people wherever he went.

“If you left it there, and let them off with it,” I remember hearing him say to my mother, “there’d be no justice left in the land. Right’s right, and wrong’s wrong.”

Bit by bit he had to sell our land, and when I came home from my school—where I had never been really happy, I may say—I found that our fifteen hundred acres had shrunk to a miserable four hundred. And even that was not the end, for, when Alice v. Gushall went to the Lords, and with it my childish respect for the aristocracy, father had to mortgage our remaining property. If it had not been for old Aunt Smith, who had quarrelled with my father over their father’s will, some forty years before, I should have faced the world penniless, or almost so.

She left me her little fortune, bringing in some six hundred a year.

The thing I remember best about my mother, apart from her devotion to me, was her wonderful way of judging character. There were few people who could hide their true selves from her. Naturally acute, and a hater of shams, she could see below the surface, and detect the real nature of men and women who had been able to hide from less perceptive folk the low motives and mean instincts actuating them.

I always admired and wondered at this trait in her. How did she know? How could she know? But she did. Long before Squire Pyrtson got his deserts, for instance, she told my father that the man would come to no good. Yet she was quite upset when that dreadful case did come on.

“It’s almost as if I knew,” she said. “Not that I ever wished the man any harm.”

Only my father and I knew what charity lay behind those words; for Squire Pyrtson had been rude to her more than once, particularly in connection with the committee for the flower show.

“It’s just like the cat’s whiskers,” my father said once in his jocular way. “Mummy doesn’t require to see them; even in the dark she knows what’s there.”

My mother died, poor dear, when Alice v. Sprigge and Sonsy had just gone before the Court of Appeal. A week before, I heard her tell father that he had been unwise: “Lord Chief Justice Polloren doesn’t look the man for his position, dad!” she said.

He felt a sort of bitter pleasure perhaps when he saw how right she had been. Old Polloren did not seem to have even listened to our side of the case. His judgment [sic] was a masterpiece of prejudice, and bad law—or so dad said.

Well, dad did not survive that year. The lawyers killed him, as they were, later, almost to kill me. I had my own income by then, and twenty pounds a year left by my father. I travelled on the Continent for six months, and then tried living with a friend in a flat in London.

Children are notoriously grudging of praise for their parents nowadays. But I say thankfully that, whatever I am, I owe it to my father and mother.

CHAPTER II

I soon found that you cannot live with a friend in a flat. You lose one, or leave the other; or both.

You see, friends are strangers that you meet oftener than strangers, and you have always an idea that they share your ideas and ideals. But they never do; only look and talk as if they did until you are a few months in the same rooms with them.

And their friends! It is extraordinary how undiscriminating one’s friends are. They get to know the most appalling people. And they don’t see it.

Lucille and I started with a house-warming; and, of course, I dared not suggest that my friends and hers should come on different days. In fact, I went quite innocently and happily into the arrangement. I do not say that my friends would not have been quite nice to at least two of Lucille’s. But she had at least eight people who were, to put it mildly, odd.

One was a lawyer’s wife, and she got quite nasty when I spoke of my experience of lawyers, and how they had killed poor father. Then there was a woman who had something to do with art. My own opinion is that it went no further than her complexion.

And the men! You meet lots of men in the country, but those were too definitely absurd. One had a laugh like a horse; and another insisted on getting up and dancing with Lucille. They had blank faces, like the white sides of country cottages, and their idea of humour was extremely weird.

My friends did their best for a time, but even they could not put up with such a collection. When Dora, who lived in France for a long time, said: “Réunion magnifique!” (not knowing that anyone knew French) that art woman was furious.

Lucille—I must say that for her—was never too bad. But she was noisy, and terribly full of good spirits, and finally tried my nerves so much that I decided to leave. She was rather stuffy about it, but people are when you don’t see eye to eye with them. I find they think they are never in the wrong; which is silly and illogical, but one must put up with it.

I tried several things after that: women’s clubs, where they were silly and cattish, or very earnest; then a cottage in the country, where no one calls unless you belong to about six families; then a hotel in London. This was full of people who were very old and grumpy, or very young and stupid. Then I went abroad again.

What weird people go abroad! You never see them in England, but they are English. Perhaps we keep them for export. But they have one thing in common with the people at home. They never think of anyone else’s tastes or feelings. I began to despair of human nature, and simply fled home again.

My father once said: “If you understand yourself, it i...