What I Know About Secret Letters
I am happy and I want to write about something charming. In a biography today I strayed across the story of a young man writing elaborate love notes to his secret betrothed. Immediately I thought how I should like to review what I know about secret letters---I mean the kind handwritten and often in code---for you, because they are now antique and always seem to be a memory lost in the midst of grown-up affairs.
Secret letters are not, however, a mere memory in the minds of children, strategists, and pranksters. When we were children at our war games, we had all manner of coded notes. It gave me quite a thrill, as a seven-year-old, to scribble the simple alphabet-scrambled letters that we wrote with pencil on scraps of paper and slipped breathlessly to one another in the woods behind the house. These were always signs and countersigns, reports from "the front" of the battle, clues to the enemy's whereabouts, and so on. I associate them always in my memory with sticky scented pine sap and our tree fort.
Later, of course, we drew up more important documents: death warrants for whichever of us had suddenly become a desperate criminal; pirate contracts signed in blood (or berry juice), treasure maps, and so on. But these were not secret letters. Then I began to write stories, also in pencil on lined paper, when I was ten---but these were not secret letters. They were only fragments of fancies kept in a tin box, romances wrapped in the smell of summer grass and the history that creeps into one's blood if one is fortunate enough to spend a few years of childhood in a Civil War farmhouse.
The letters came again though, after a while. Dear reader, you will laugh when I tell you that my first experience of love letters was a long series of pranks. I don't remember who began it---I think my brothers did. They took to putting quite elaborate and soupy love letters in my jewelry box when I was a girl of fourteen or fifteen. These were always from a "secret admirer" who was hinted to be a baron or a duke or a count.
Well, I reciprocated of course, and naturally went one better. The anonymous love notes I left in their bathrobe pockets were drenched with the smelliest perfume I could find. This went on for several weeks, back and forth, quite a storm of sentiment. At last we tired of the game and dropped it.
I was not to know secret letters again until my sophomore year in college, when I undertook to teach a few friends how to write in elven. I would leave them letters in a particular book---a volume of fairy tales, as I recall---in the college library. No one ever checked out that book, so we were safe, and it was such fun! I remember the thrill of anticipation I always felt, walking into the library oh-so-ladylike and demure and academic and grown-up, in a long gray skirt and starched white lace blouse, with books in my arms and my hair in crossed braids... and thinking "No one knows! No one knows! No one knows that I have a secret letter! Here! In the library, with everybody else so modern and studious and unsuspecting!"
There were days when I could burst for the sheer delight of it, and when I had my letter I would go across campus to read it in the white gazebo by the pond, and would sit deciphering the curved elvish characters and amusing myself for an hour together, dreaming out across the pond. One day in my senior year, just for fun, I donned that old outfit of gray and white and put on a pink silk shawl (it was a cool autumn day) and went to the gazebo for our Medieval literature class. A classmate called me "the picture of Romanticism." I only made a face at her (she knew I hated the Romantics) and laughed. Sometimes I left secret letters, addressed to no one and telling great secrets, in the eaves of the little gazebo. Perhaps I meant them for the gazebo itself, or perhaps for the fairies.
Anyway, we outgrew that game in the library after awhile, and for a long time there were no more secret letters---for I was growing up. But then one fine day, when I was quite grown up and had no excuse for it whatsoever (except my own mischief), I played a prank on the two leads in the play I was directing. The play was Cyrano de Bergerac, and involved a simply enormous number of love letters and an equal amount of love-letter-writing. I decided that I wanted the boys to practice. To that end, I called together all the girls who happened to be on hand in my dorm and got eight of them to co-author a set of love notes, which we spattered with perfume and wrapped around chocolates and caused to be deposited in their shoes in their dorm room (girls were never allowed in the boys' dorm rooms, but it was not difficult to find a boy willing to act as our accomplice).
Well! That was a lovely prank. And then the boys had to write notes back, for play practice, and leave them in a volume of Aristophanes in the library. I do genuinely believe it improved their roles a little... but of course that wasn't really the point. The point was fun, and what fun the girls had reading their outrageously silly replies to our equally hilarious letters!
Ah, that play was good all the way round. We were all friends; all glad to be nonsensical and play pranks in a cheerful, innocent, happy way. When my producer's birthday came around, the gang of fourteen boys who were in the play all dressed up and sang French songs beneath her window, and we gave her a double-guard procession and an open car all the way from her dorm to the dining hall, where there was sparkling cider and cheesecake. We had royal good times!
But to return. Years have passed without any secret letters---which is sad, now I think of it, and makes me wish for some---and I had not thought of them at all until yesterday. I was trying to quiet a screaming child. From experience I knew that drawing on a chalkboard sometimes does the trick, so I set the little girl on top of a low bookshelf, picked up a piece of yellow chalk, and began to write whatever came into my head---in elvish of course. I didn't much want the rest of the workers in the room to read it.
Then one of them came up and said, "What is that?" By now the little girl was quiet, so I explained how I had adapted the characters for my own use so as to be able to write without other people reading my thoughts. "Is it just a different alphabet?" He asked. "Yes," I replied, "Unless I want to be really secret, and then I write it in Latin and elvish both." He picked up the chalk and said "This is what I used to use to write letters to my high school girlfriend in class." And then, to my astonishment, he began to write nearly perfect cursive---backwards. Truly! If I had had a mirror, it would have been easy to read. As it was, I had to work hard to decipher the letters.
"I wrote her 180 letters that way," he said, proudly. "Wow," I replied. "That's amazing!" And it was.
We are now come full circle to today and the biography I was reading. Now you know all that I know about secret letters, dear reader. What a pity you are nobody and everybody and can't send me some! Wouldn't it be delightful if you could? After all, I tell you so much more than I do almost anybody else (though of course there's a lot I don't tell even to you), and if you could write back we should have so much to talk about! But of course, being nobody and everybody, you can't. Still, I don't mind. You are my nobody and my everybody, and that is enough for me.
Good night, dear beloved reader. Tell the Fairy Queen for me, that I mean to attend her at her water palace in the fourth star to the right at midnight. There is to be dancing there til dawn.
Secret letters are not, however, a mere memory in the minds of children, strategists, and pranksters. When we were children at our war games, we had all manner of coded notes. It gave me quite a thrill, as a seven-year-old, to scribble the simple alphabet-scrambled letters that we wrote with pencil on scraps of paper and slipped breathlessly to one another in the woods behind the house. These were always signs and countersigns, reports from "the front" of the battle, clues to the enemy's whereabouts, and so on. I associate them always in my memory with sticky scented pine sap and our tree fort.
Later, of course, we drew up more important documents: death warrants for whichever of us had suddenly become a desperate criminal; pirate contracts signed in blood (or berry juice), treasure maps, and so on. But these were not secret letters. Then I began to write stories, also in pencil on lined paper, when I was ten---but these were not secret letters. They were only fragments of fancies kept in a tin box, romances wrapped in the smell of summer grass and the history that creeps into one's blood if one is fortunate enough to spend a few years of childhood in a Civil War farmhouse.
The letters came again though, after a while. Dear reader, you will laugh when I tell you that my first experience of love letters was a long series of pranks. I don't remember who began it---I think my brothers did. They took to putting quite elaborate and soupy love letters in my jewelry box when I was a girl of fourteen or fifteen. These were always from a "secret admirer" who was hinted to be a baron or a duke or a count.
Well, I reciprocated of course, and naturally went one better. The anonymous love notes I left in their bathrobe pockets were drenched with the smelliest perfume I could find. This went on for several weeks, back and forth, quite a storm of sentiment. At last we tired of the game and dropped it.
I was not to know secret letters again until my sophomore year in college, when I undertook to teach a few friends how to write in elven. I would leave them letters in a particular book---a volume of fairy tales, as I recall---in the college library. No one ever checked out that book, so we were safe, and it was such fun! I remember the thrill of anticipation I always felt, walking into the library oh-so-ladylike and demure and academic and grown-up, in a long gray skirt and starched white lace blouse, with books in my arms and my hair in crossed braids... and thinking "No one knows! No one knows! No one knows that I have a secret letter! Here! In the library, with everybody else so modern and studious and unsuspecting!"
There were days when I could burst for the sheer delight of it, and when I had my letter I would go across campus to read it in the white gazebo by the pond, and would sit deciphering the curved elvish characters and amusing myself for an hour together, dreaming out across the pond. One day in my senior year, just for fun, I donned that old outfit of gray and white and put on a pink silk shawl (it was a cool autumn day) and went to the gazebo for our Medieval literature class. A classmate called me "the picture of Romanticism." I only made a face at her (she knew I hated the Romantics) and laughed. Sometimes I left secret letters, addressed to no one and telling great secrets, in the eaves of the little gazebo. Perhaps I meant them for the gazebo itself, or perhaps for the fairies.
Anyway, we outgrew that game in the library after awhile, and for a long time there were no more secret letters---for I was growing up. But then one fine day, when I was quite grown up and had no excuse for it whatsoever (except my own mischief), I played a prank on the two leads in the play I was directing. The play was Cyrano de Bergerac, and involved a simply enormous number of love letters and an equal amount of love-letter-writing. I decided that I wanted the boys to practice. To that end, I called together all the girls who happened to be on hand in my dorm and got eight of them to co-author a set of love notes, which we spattered with perfume and wrapped around chocolates and caused to be deposited in their shoes in their dorm room (girls were never allowed in the boys' dorm rooms, but it was not difficult to find a boy willing to act as our accomplice).
Well! That was a lovely prank. And then the boys had to write notes back, for play practice, and leave them in a volume of Aristophanes in the library. I do genuinely believe it improved their roles a little... but of course that wasn't really the point. The point was fun, and what fun the girls had reading their outrageously silly replies to our equally hilarious letters!
Ah, that play was good all the way round. We were all friends; all glad to be nonsensical and play pranks in a cheerful, innocent, happy way. When my producer's birthday came around, the gang of fourteen boys who were in the play all dressed up and sang French songs beneath her window, and we gave her a double-guard procession and an open car all the way from her dorm to the dining hall, where there was sparkling cider and cheesecake. We had royal good times!
But to return. Years have passed without any secret letters---which is sad, now I think of it, and makes me wish for some---and I had not thought of them at all until yesterday. I was trying to quiet a screaming child. From experience I knew that drawing on a chalkboard sometimes does the trick, so I set the little girl on top of a low bookshelf, picked up a piece of yellow chalk, and began to write whatever came into my head---in elvish of course. I didn't much want the rest of the workers in the room to read it.
Then one of them came up and said, "What is that?" By now the little girl was quiet, so I explained how I had adapted the characters for my own use so as to be able to write without other people reading my thoughts. "Is it just a different alphabet?" He asked. "Yes," I replied, "Unless I want to be really secret, and then I write it in Latin and elvish both." He picked up the chalk and said "This is what I used to use to write letters to my high school girlfriend in class." And then, to my astonishment, he began to write nearly perfect cursive---backwards. Truly! If I had had a mirror, it would have been easy to read. As it was, I had to work hard to decipher the letters.
"I wrote her 180 letters that way," he said, proudly. "Wow," I replied. "That's amazing!" And it was.
We are now come full circle to today and the biography I was reading. Now you know all that I know about secret letters, dear reader. What a pity you are nobody and everybody and can't send me some! Wouldn't it be delightful if you could? After all, I tell you so much more than I do almost anybody else (though of course there's a lot I don't tell even to you), and if you could write back we should have so much to talk about! But of course, being nobody and everybody, you can't. Still, I don't mind. You are my nobody and my everybody, and that is enough for me.
Good night, dear beloved reader. Tell the Fairy Queen for me, that I mean to attend her at her water palace in the fourth star to the right at midnight. There is to be dancing there til dawn.
posted by Praelucor at 8:26 PM
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