Dorothy Sayers - The Nine Tailors

The clock in the tower chimed the three-quarters. “Bless my heart!” cried the Rector, conscience-stricken, “and dinner was to be at half-past! My wife — we must wait till to-night. You will get a general idea of the majesty and beauty of our church if you attend the service, though there are many most interesting details that a visitor is almost bound to miss if they are not pointed out to him, The font, for instance — Jack! bring the lantern here a moment — there is one point about our font which is most uncommon, and I should like to show it to you. Jack!”

But Jack, unaccountably deaf, was jingling the church keys in the porch, and the Rector, sighing a little, accepted defeat.

“I fear it is true,” he said, as he trotted down the path, “that I am inclined to lose count of time.”

“Perhaps,” replied Wimsey politely, “the being continually in and about this church brings eternity too close.”

“Very true,” said the Rector, “very true — though there are mementoes enough to mark the passage of time. Remind me to-morrow to show you the tomb of Nathaniel Perkins — one of our local worthies and a great sportsman. He refereed once for the great Tom Sayers, and was a notable figure at all the ‘mills’ for miles around, and when he died — Here we are at home. I will tell you later about Nathaniel Perkins. Well, my dear, we’re back at last! Not so very late after all. Come along, come along. You must make a good dinner, Lord Peter, to fit you for your exertions. What have we here? Stewed oxtail? Excellent! Most sustaining! I trust, Lord Peter, you can eat stewed oxtail. For what we are about to receive…”

THE SECOND COURSE

THE BELLS IN THEIR COURSES

When mirth and pleasure is on the wing we ring;

At the departure of a soul we toll.

Ringers’ Rules at Southill, Bedfordshire.

After dinner, Mrs. Venables resolutely asserted her authority. She sent Lord Peter up to his room, regardless of the Rector, who was helplessly hunting through a set of untidy bookshelves in search of the Rev. Christopher Woollcott’s History of the Bells of Fenchurch St. Paul.

“I can’t imagine what has become of it,” said the Rector: “I fear I’m sadly unmethodical. But perhaps you would like to look at this — a trifling contribution of my own to campanological lore. I know, my dear, I know — I must not detain Lord Peter — it is thoughtless of me.”

“You must get some rest yourself, Theodore.”

“Yes, yes, my dear. In a moment. I was only—”

Wimsey saw that the one way to quiet the Rector was to desert him without compunction. He retired, accordingly, and was captured at the head of the stairs by Bunter, who tucked him firmly up beneath the eiderdown with a hot-water bottle and shut the door upon him.

A roaring fire burned in the grate. Wimsey drew the lamp closer to him, opened the little brochure presented to him by the Rector, and studied the title-page:

An Inquiry into

the Mathematical Theory

of the

IN AND OUT OF COURSE

together with Directions for

Calling Bells into Rounds

from any position

in all the recognised Methods

upon a

New and Scientific Principle

by

Theodore Venables, M.A.

Rector of Fenchurch St. Paul

sometime Scholar of Caius Coll: Camb:

author of

“Change-ringing for Country Churches,”

“Fifty Short Touches of Grandsire Triples,”

etc.

“God is gone up with a merry noise.”

MCMII

The letter-press was of a soporific tendency; so was the stewed oxtail; the room was warm; the day had been a tiring one; the lines swam before Lord Peter’s eyes. He nodded; a coal tinkled from the grate; he roused himself with a jerk and read: “… if the 5th is in course after the 7th (says Shipway), and 7th after the 6th, they are right, when the small bells, 2, 3, 4, are brought as directed in the preceding peals; but if 6, 7 are together without the 5th, call the 5th into the hunt….”

Lord Peter Wimsey nodded away into dreams.

* * *

He was roused by the pealing of bells.

For a moment, memory eluded him — then he flung the eiderdown aside and sat up, ruffled and reproachful, to encounter the calm gaze of Bunter.

“Good God! I’ve been asleep! Why didn’t you call me? They’ve begun without me.”

“Mrs. Venables gave orders, my lord, that you were not to be disturbed until half-past eleven, and the reverend gentleman instructed me to say, my lord, that they would content themselves with ringing six bells as a preliminary to the service.”

“What time is it now?”

“Nearly five minutes to eleven, my lord.”

As he spoke, the pealing ceased, and Jubilee began to ring the five-minute bell.

“Dash it all!” said Wimsey. “This will never do. Must go and hear the old boy’s sermon. Give me a hairbrush. Is it still snowing?”

“Harder than ever, my lord.”

Wimsey made a hasty toilet and ran downstairs, Bunter following him decorously. They let themselves out by the front door, and, guided by Bunter’s electric torch, made their way through the shrubbery and across the road to the church, entering just as the organ boomed out its final notes. Choir and parson were in their places and Wimsey, blinking in the yellow lamplight, at length discovered his seven fellow-ringers seated on a row of chairs beneath the tower. He picked his way cautiously over the cocoa-nut matting towards them, while Bunter, who had apparently acquired all the necessary information beforehand, made his unperturbed way to a pew in the north aisle and sat down beside Emily from the Rectory. Old Hezekiah Lavender greeted Wimsey with a welcoming chuckle and thrust a prayer-book under his nose as he knelt down to pray.

“Dearly beloved brethren—”

Wimsey scrambled to his feet and looked round. At the first glance he felt himself sobered and awestricken by the noble proportions of the church, in whose vast spaces the congregation — though a good one for so small a parish in the dead of a winter’s night — seemed almost lost. The wide nave and shadowy aisles, the lofty span of the chancel arch — crossed, though not obscured, by the delicate fan-tracery and crenellated moulding of the screen — the intimate and cloistered loveliness of the chancel, with its pointed arcading, graceful ribbed vault and five narrow east lancets, led his attention on and focused it first upon the remote glow of the sanctuary. Then his gaze, returning to the nave, followed the strong yet slender shafting that sprang fountain-like from floor to foliated column-head, spraying into the light, wide arches that carried the clerestory. And there, mounting to the steep pitch of the roof, his eyes were held entranced with wonder and delight. Incredibly aloof, flinging back the light in a dusky shimmer of bright hair and gilded outspread wings, soared the ranked angels, cherubim and seraphim, choir over choir, from corbel and hammerbeam floating face to face uplifted.

“My God!” muttered Wimsey, not without reverence. And he softly repeated to himself: “He rode upon the cherubims and did fly; He came flying upon the wings of the wind.”

Mr. Hezekiah Lavender poked his new colleague sharply in the ribs, and Wimsey became aware that the congregation had settled down to the General Confession, leaving him alone and agape upon his feet. Hurriedly he turned the leaves of his prayer-book and applied himself to making the proper responses. Mr. Lavender, who had obviously decided that he was either a half-wit or a heathen, assisted him by finding the Psalms for him and by bawling every verse very loudly in his ear.

“… Praise Him in the cymbals and dances: praise Him upon the strings and pipe.”