Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (64 page)

If
Christmas Day on Monday be, A great winter that year you'll see, And full of
winds, both loud and shrill; But, in summer, truth to tell, High winds shall
there be and strong, Full of tempests lasting long, While battles they shall
multiply, And great plenty of beasts shall die....

— Traditional

Television, that vilified
form of entertainment, has been largely responsible for the renewed interest in
Dorothy L. Sayers and her creation, Lord Peter Wimsey. A BBC series starring
Ian Carmichael brought this faintly absurd detective to life with such success
as to establish him anew among the great detectives of literature. For a whole
new generation, Wimsey became not only an important historical figure, but
again a very vital
one.

Sayers, like Wimsey, was
a faintly absurd character. She was an Oxford-trained classical scholar who
worked in an advertising agency and wrote detective stories to make ends meet.
By 1942, she had become so successful as a writer that she decided to drop the
Wimsey series. Five years later she announced that she would give up detective
fiction entirely and devote herself to the kind of things she always had wanted
to write. From then on she wrote only classical studies and religious plays.

It was later disclosed
that she had secretly given birth to a son in 1924. Two years later she married
a man described as a “bar-fly and ne’er-do-well,” and farmed the son out to be
raised by a cousin.

It can be inferred from
this that Dorothy L. Sayers was a woman who did exactly as she pleased most of
her life. Fortunately it pleased her to give us Lord Peter and his amusing
adventures. And that pleases us very much.

Sir Septimus Shale
was
accustomed to assert his authority once in the year and once only. He allowed
his young and fashionable wife to fill his house with diagrammatic furniture
made of steel; to collect advanced artists and anti-grammatical poets; to
believe in cocktails and relativity and to dress as extravagantly as she
pleased; but he did insist on an old-fashioned Christmas. He was a
simple-hearted man, who really liked plum-pudding and cracker mottoes, and he
could not get it out of his head that other people, “at bottom,” enjoyed these
things also. At Christmas, therefore, he firmly retired to his country house in
Essex, called in the servants to hang holly and mistletoe upon the cubist
electric fittings; loaded the steel sideboard with delicacies from Fortnum
& Mason; hung up stockings at the heads of the polished walnut bedsteads;
and even, on this occasion only, had the electric radiators removed from the
modernist grates and installed wood fires and a Yule log. He then gathered his
family and friends about him, filled them with as much Dickensian good fare as
he could persuade them to swallow, and, after their Christmas dinner, set them
down to play “Charades” and “Clumps” and “Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral” in
the drawing-room, concluding these diversions by “Hide-and-Seek” in the dark
all over the house. Because Sir Septimus was a very rich man, his guests fell
in with this invariable programme, and if they were bored, they did not tell
him so.

Another charming and
traditional custom which he followed was that of presenting to his daughter
Margharita a pearl on each successive birthday —this anniversary happening to
coincide with Christmas Eve. The pearls now numbered twenty, and the collection
was beginning to enjoy a certain celebrity, and had been photographed in the
Society papers. Though not sensationally large—each one being about the size of
a marrow-fat pea— the pearls were of very great value. They were of exquisite
colour and perfect shape and matched to a hair’s-weight. On this particular
Christmas Eve, the presentation of the twenty-first pearl had been the occasion
of a very special ceremony. There was a dance and there were speeches. On the
Christmas night, following, the more restricted family party took place, with
the turkey and the Victorian games. There were eleven guests, in addition to
Sir Septimus and Lady Shale and their daughter, nearly all related or connected
to them in some way: John Shale, a brother, with his wife and their son and
daughter Henry and Betty; Betty’s fiancé, Oswald Truegood, a young man with
parliamentary ambitions; George Comphrey, a cousin of Lady Shale’s, aged about
thirty and known as a man about town; Lavinia Prescott, asked on George’s
account; Joyce Trivett, asked on Henry Shale’s account; Richard and Beryl
Dennison, distant relations of Lady Shale, who lived a gay and expensive life
in town on nobody precisely knew what resources; and Lord Peter Wimsey, asked,
in a touching spirit of unreasonable hope, on Margharita’s account. There were
also, of course, William Norgate, secretary to Sir Septimus, and Miss Tomkins,
secretary to Lady Shale, who had to be there because, without their calm
efficiency, the Christmas arrangements could not have been carried through.

Dinner was over—a
seemingly endless succession of soup, fish, turkey, roast beef, plum-pudding,
mince-pies, crystallized fruit, nuts, and five kinds of wine, presided over by
Sir Septimus, all smiles, by Lady Shale, all mocking deprecation, and by
Margharita, pretty and bored, with the necklace of twenty-one pearls gleaming
softly on her slender throat. Gorged and dyspeptic and longing only for the
horizontal position, the company had been shepherded into the drawing-room and
set to play “Musical Chairs” (Miss Tomkins at the piano), “Hunt the Slipper”
(slipper provided by Miss Tomkins), and “Dumb Crambo” (costumes by Miss Tomkins
and Mr. William Norgate). The back drawing-room (for Sir Septimus clung to
these old-fashioned names) provided an admirable dressing-room, being screened
by folding doors from the large drawing-room in which the audience sat on
aluminum chairs, scrabbling uneasy toes on a floor of black glass under the
tremendous illumination of electricity reflected from a brass ceiling.

It was William Norgate
who, after taking the temperature of the meeting, suggested to Lady Shale that
they should play at something less athletic. Lady Shale agreed and, as usual suggested
bridge. Sir Septimus, as usual, blew the suggestion aside.

“Bridge? Nonsense!
Nonsense! Play bridge every day of your lives. This is Christmas time.
Something we can all play together. How about ‘Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral’?”

This intellectual pastime
was a favourite with Sir Septimus; he was rather good at putting pregnant
questions. After a brief discussion, it became evident that this game was an
inevitable part of the programme. The party settled down to it, Sir Septimus undertaking
to “go out” first and set the thing going.

Presently they had
guessed among other things Miss Tomkins’s mother’s photograph, a gramophone
record of “I want to be happy” (much scientific research into the exact
composition of records, settled by William Norgate out of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica),
the smallest stickleback
in the stream at the bottom of the garden, the new planet Pluto, the scarf worn
by Mrs. Dennison (very confusing, because it was not silk, which would be
animal, or artificial silk, which would be vegetable, but made of spun
glass—mineral, a very clever choice of subject), and had failed to guess the
Prime Minister’s wireless speech—which was voted not fair, since nobody could
decide whether it was animal by nature or a kind of gas. It was decided that
they should do one more word and then go on to “Hide-and-Seek.” Oswald Truegood
had retired into the back room and shut the door behind him while the party
discussed the next subject of examination, when suddenly Sir Septimus broke in
on the argument by calling to his daughter:

“Hullo, Margy! What have
you done with your necklace?”

“I took it off, Dad,
because I thought it might get broken in ‘Dumb Crambo.’ It’s over here on this
table. No, it isn’t. Did you take it, mother?”

“No, I didn’t. If I’d
seen it, I should have. You are a careless child.”

“I believe you’ve got it
yourself, Dad. You’re teasing.”

Sir Septimus denied the
accusation with some energy. Everybody got up and began to hunt about. There
were not many places in that bare and polished room where a necklace could be
hidden. After ten minutes’ fruitless investigation, Richard Dennison, who had
been seated next to the table where the pearls had been placed, began to look
rather uncomfortable.

“Awkward, you know,” he
remarked to Wimsey.

At this moment, Oswald
Truegood put his head through the folding-doors and asked whether they hadn’t
settled on something by now, because he was getting the fidgets.

This directed the
attention of the searchers to the inner room. Margharita must have been
mistaken. She had taken it in there, and it had got mixed up with the
dressing-up clothes somehow. The room was ransacked. Everything was lifted up
and shaken. The thing began to look serious. After half an hour of desperate
energy it became apparent that the pearls were nowhere to be found.

“They must be somewhere
in these two rooms, you know,” said Wimsey. “The back drawing-room has no door
and nobody could have gone out of the front drawing-room without being seen.
Unless the windows—”

No. The windows were all
guarded on the outside by heavy shutters which it needed two footmen to take
down and replace. The pearls had not gone out that way. In fact, the mere
suggestion that they had left the drawing-room at all was disagreeable.
Because—because—

It was William Norgate,
efficient as ever, who coldly and boldly, faced the issue.

“I think, Sir Septimus,
it would be a relief to the minds of everybody present if we could all be
searched.”

Sir Septimus was
horrified, but the guests, having found a leader, backed up Norgate. The door
was locked, and the search was conducted—the ladies in the inner room and the
men in the outer.

Nothing resulted from it
except some very interesting information about the belongings habitually
carried about by the average man and woman. It was natural that Lord Peter
Wimsey should possess a pair of forceps, a pocket lens, and a small folding
foot-rule—was he not a Sherlock Holmes in high life? But that Oswald Truegood
should have two liver-pills in a screw of paper and Henry Shale a pocket
edition of
The Odes of Horace
was unexpected. Why did John Shale distend the pockets of his dress-suit with a
stump of red sealing-wax, an ugly little mascot, and a five-shilling piece?
George Comphrey had a pair of folding scissors, and three wrapped lumps of
sugar, of the sort served in restaurants and dining-cars—evidence of a not
uncommon form of kleptomania; but that the tidy and exact Norgate should burden
himself with a reel of white cotton, three separate lengths of string, and twelve
safety-pins on a card seemed really remarkable till one remembered that he had
superintended all the Christmas decorations. Richard Dennison, amid some
confusion and laughter, was found to cherish a lady’s garter, a powder-compact,
and half a potato; the last named, he said, was a prophylactic against
rheumatism (to which he was subject), while the other objects belonged to his
wife. On the ladies’ side, the more striking exhibits were a little book on
palmistry, three invisible hairpins, and a baby’s photograph (Miss Tomkins); a
Chinese trick cigarette-case with a secret compartment (Beryl Dennison); a
very
private letter and an outfit for mending
stocking-ladders (Lavinia Prescott); and a pair of eyebrow tweezers and a small
packet of white powder, said to be for headaches (Betty Shale). An agitating
moment followed the production from Joyce Trivett’s handbag of a small string
of pearls—but it was promptly remembered that these had come out of one of the
crackers at dinner-time, and they were, in fact, synthetic. In short, the
search was unproductive of anything beyond a general shamefacedness and the
discomfort always produced by undressing and re-dressing in a hurry at the
wrong time of day.