Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (18 page)

“Anyway,” he says, “we
never get to see Dancing Dan. We watch the joint from six-thirty in the evening
until daylight Christmas morning, and nobody goes in all night but old Ooky the
Santa Claus guy in his Santa Claus makeup, and,” Shotgun says, “nobody comes
out except you and Good Time Charley and Ooky.”

“Well,” Shotgun says, “it
is a great break for Dancing Dan he never goes in or comes out of Good Time
Charley’s, at that, because,” he says, “we are waiting for him on the
second-floor front of the building across the way with some nice little
sawed-offs, and are under orders from Heine not to miss.”

“Well, Shotgun,” I say, “Merry
Christmas.”

“Well, all right,” Shotgun
says, “Merry Christmas.”

THE MURDER FOR CHRISTMAS GUIDE TO GIFT GIVING

Obviously
there should be a standard value for a certain type of Christmas present. One
may give what one will to one's own family or particular friends; that is all
right. But in a Christmas house-party there is a pleasant interchange of
parcels, of which the string and the brown paper and the kindly thought are the
really important ingredients, and the gift inside is nothing more than an
excuse for these things. It is embarrassing for you if Jones has apologised for
his brown paper with a hundred cigars and you have only excused yourself with
twenty-five cigarettes; perhaps still more embarrassing if it is you who have
lost so heavily on the exchange. An understanding that the contents were to be
worth five shillings exactly would avoid this embarrassment.

And
now... I am reminded of the ingenuity of a friend of mine, William by name, who
arrived at a large country house for Christmas without any present in his bag.
He had expected neither to give nor to receive anything, but to his horror he
discovered on the 24th that everybody was preparing a Christmas present for
him, and that it was taken for granted that he would require a little privacy
and brown paper on Christmas Eve for the purpose of addressing his own
offerings to others. He had wild thoughts of telegraphing to London for
something to be sent down, and spoke to other members of the house-party in
order to discover what sorts of presents would be suitable.

"What
are you giving our host?" he asked one of them.

"Mary
and I are giving him a book," said John, referring to his wife.

William
then approached the youngest son of the house, and discovered that he and his
next brother Dick were sharing in this, that, and the other. When he had heard
this, William retired to his room and thought profoundly.

He was
the first down to breakfast on Christmas morning. All the places at the table
were piled high with presents. He looked at John's place. The top parcel said,
"To John and Mary from Charles. " William took out his fountain-pen
and added a couple of words to the inscription. It then read, "To John and
Mary from Charles and William," and in William's opinion looked just as
effective as before. He moved on to the next place. "To Angela from
Father," said the top parcel. "And William," wrote William. At
his hostess' place he hesitated for a moment. The first present there was for
"Darling Mother, from her loving children. " It did not seem that an
"and William" was quite suitable. But his hostess was not to be
deprived of William's kindly thought; twenty seconds later the handkerchiefs
"from John and Mary and William" expressed all the nice things which
he was feeling for her. He passed on to the next place....

It is of
course impossible to thank every donor of a joint gift; one simply thanks the
first person whose eye one happens to catch. Sometimes William's eye was
caught, sometimes not. But he was spared all embarrassment; and I can recommend
his solution of the problem with perfect confidence to those who may be in a
similar predicament next Christmas.

A. A.
Milne

©A. A. Milne

Reprinted by
permission E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., New York

Occasionally
some killjoy turns up at Christmas to dampen everyone’s joy. Take Sir Harry
Strangeway. He keeps insisting that somebody is trying to poison him. He could
ruin everyone’s holiday if allowed to go on. Fortunately, Harry will not be
around for long.

Marjorie Bowen, the lady behind this
scenario, is a name known only to the most avid mystery reader. Yet, during her
career, she wrote prolifically under a number of pseudonyms. As Joseph
Shearing, she wrote a fascinating book called
So Evil My Love
which was turned into an
atmospheric film starring Ray Milland and Ann Todd.

No less an authority than Joan Kahn,
the venerable editor and anthologist, draws upon Bowen’s stories for her own
collections. She recalled that, when she began her celebrated years at
Harper’s, she dropped all its mystery writers save John Dickson Carr, Nicholas
Blake (C. Day Lewis, then England’s poet laureate), and Marjorie Bowen. A
formidable recommendation, that.

Bowen has also written a second
Christmas crime story ,”The Prescription,” which can be found in the excellent
anthology,
Christmas Ghosts,
edited by Gogo Lewis and
Seon Manley.

The situation was bizarre
;
the
accurately trained mind
of
Bevis Holroyd was impressed foremost by this; that the opening of a door would
turn it into tragedy.

“I am afraid I can’t stay,”
he had said pleasantly, humouring a sick man; he was too young and had not been
long enough completely successful to have a professional manner but a certain
balanced tolerance just showed in his attitude to this prostrate creature.

“I’ve got a good many
claims on my time,” he added, “and I’m afraid it would be impossible. And it
isn’t the least necessary, you know. You’re quite all right. I’ll come back
after Christmas if you really think it worth while.”

The patient opened one
eye; he was lying flat on his back in a deep, wide-fashioned bed hung with a
thick dark, silk-lined tapestry; the room was dark for there were thick
curtains of the same material drawn half across the windows, rigidly excluding
all save a moiety of the pallid winter light; to make his examination Dr.
Holroyd had had to snap on the electric light that stood on the bedside table;
he thought it a dreary unhealthy room, but had hardly found it worth while to
say as much.

The patient opened one
eye; the other lid remained fluttering feebly over an immobile orb.

He said in a voice both
hoarse and feeble: “But, doctor, I’m being poisoned.”

Professional curiosity
and interest masked by genial incredulity instantly quickened the doctor’s
attention.

“My dear sir,” he smiled,
“poisoned by this nasty bout of ‘flu you mean, I suppose—”

“No,” said the patient,
faintly and wearily dropping both lids over his blank eyes, “by my wife.”

“That’s an ugly sort of
fancy for you to get hold of,” replied the doctor instantly. “Acute
depression—we must see what we can do for you—”

The sick man opened both
eyes now; he even slightly raised his head as he replied, not without dignity:

 “I fetched you from
London, Dr. Holroyd, that you might deal with my case impartially—from the
local man there is no hope of that, he is entirely impressed by my wife.”

Dr. Holroyd made a
movement as if to protest but a trembling sign from the patient made him
quickly subsist.

“Please let me speak.
She
will come in soon and I shall have no chance. I sent
for you secretly, she knows nothing about that. I had heard you very well
spoken of—as an authority on this sort of thing. You made a name over the
Pluntre murder case as witness for the Crown.”

“I don’t specialize in
murder,” said Dr. Holroyd, but his keen handsome face was alight with interest.
“And I don’t care much for this kind of case—Sir Harry.”

“But you’ve taken it on,”
murmured the sick man. “You couldn’t abandon me now.”

“I’ll get you into a
nursing home,” said the doctor cheerfully, “and there you’ll dispel all these
ideas.”

“And when the nursing
home has cured me I’m to come back to my wife for her to begin again?”

Dr. Holroyd bent suddenly
and sharply over the sombre bed. With his right hand he deftly turned on the
electric lamp and tipped back the coral silk shade so that the bleached acid
light fell full over the patient lying on his back on the big fat pillows.

“Look here,” said the
doctor, “what you say is pretty serious.” And the two men stared at each other,
the patient examining his physician as acutely as his physician examined him.

Bevis Holroyd was still a
young man with a look of peculiar energy and austere intelligence that
heightened by contrast purely physical dark good looks that many men would have
found sufficient passport to success; resolution, dignity and a certain
masculine sweetness, serene and strong, different from feminine sweetness, marked
his demeanour which was further softened by a quick humour and a sensitive
judgment.

The patient, on the other
hand, was a man of well past middle age, light, flabby and obese with a
flaccid, fallen look about his large face which was blurred and dimmed by the
colours of ill health, being one pasty livid hue that threw into unpleasant
relief the grey speckled red of his scant hair.

Altogether an unpleasing
man, but of a certain fame and importance that had induced the rising young
doctor to come at once when hastily summoned to Strangeways Manor House; a man
of a fine, renowned family, a man of repute as a scholar, an essayist who had
once been a politician who was rather above politics; a man whom Dr. Holroyd
only knew vaguely by reputation, but who seemed to him symbolical of all that
was staid, respectable and stolid.