The Girl in Blue Read online

  P. G. WODEHOUSE

  The author of almost a hundred books and the creator of Jeeves, Blandings Castle, Psmith, Ukridge, Uncle Fred and Mr Mulliner, P.G. Wodehouse was born in 1881 and educated at Dulwich College. After two years with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank he became a full-time writer, contributing to a variety of periodicals including Punch and the Globe. He married in 1914. As well as his novels and short stories, he wrote lyrics for musical comedies with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, and at one time had five musicals running simultaneously on Broadway. His time in Hollywood also provided much source material for fiction.

  At the age of 93, in the New Year’s Honours List of 1975, he received a long-overdue knighthood, only to die on St Valentine’s Day some 45 days later.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The afternoon sun poured brightly into the office of the manager of Guildenstern’s Stores, Madison Avenue, New York, but there was no corresponding sunshine in the heart of Homer Pyle, the eminent corporation lawyer, as he sat there. He had in the opinion of his companion in the room something of the uneasy air of a cat on hot bricks. Nor is it difficult to probe the reason for his loss of aplomb. A good corporation lawyer can generally take it as well as dish it out, but it is trying him too high when you telephone him in the middle of the day’s work to inform him that his sister has just been arrested for shoplifting. In similar circumstances a Justice of the Supreme Court would wriggle and perspire.

  It added to Homer’s discomfort that he was being interviewed not by the manager, an old college friend from whom he could have expected sympathy and consideration, but by one of those sleek, shiny young men managers collect about them, the sort of young man whom he himself might have employed in his Wall Street office as a junior clerk. And from this stripling’s manner sympathy and consideration were markedly absent.

  He dabbed at his forehead with his handkerchief. He had a large, round face, mostly horn-rimmed spectacles, and its pores opened readily when he was agitated.

  There must be some mistake,’ he said.

  ‘Yup,’ said the shiny young man. ‘She made it.’

  ‘Mrs Clayborne is a wealthy woman.

  ‘Why wouldn’t she be, when her shopping costs her nothing?’

  ‘Why should she purloin goods from a department store?’

  ‘Search me. All I know is we caught her with them.’

  ‘It must have been a prank. She did it on a sudden impulse, just to see if she could do it.’

  ‘And she found out she couldn’t.’

  The thought may have occurred to Homer that the shiny young man, like Jean Ken’s snake, was having all the lines and that he himself was merely playing straight for him, for at this point he relapsed into a sombre silence. He sat musing on his sister Bernadette. Hers, he had long been aware, was a nature which led her too often to act on impulse. There was the time when she had plunged into the Central Park lake in a formfitting tweed dress from Tailored Woman to rescue a waterlogged Pekinese, and that other time when she had beaten a tough egg into a scrambled egg with her umbrella for kicking a stray cat. More than most women she seldom gave a clue as to what she would be up to next.

  But if one raised one’s eyebrows at these and similar exercises in self-expression, at shoplifting one definitely pursed the lips. Here, one felt, she had gone too far. Not her fault, of course. It was, he supposed, a sort of mental illness. Paradoxically, she helped herself because she could not help herself. Their mutual aunt Betsy, now deceased, had suffered in the same way and had come to grief during the Autumn sales at Gimbel’s. It had been until today the great scandal in the family.

  The shiny young man was speaking again, this time on a more cheerful note.

  The boss says to tell you he won’t prefer charges.’ This evidence that the old college spirit still lingered in the bosom of the man up top caused an immediate improvement in Homer’s morale. It meant that there was going to be no publicity, and it was the thought of publicity that had burned into his soul like an acid.

  ‘Provided,’ the speaker continued, and the world became dark again.

  ‘Provided?’ he quavered.

  ‘Provided you get her out of the city right away.’

  Homer’s sigh of relief was virtually a snort.

  ‘That can be managed.’

  ‘It better be.’

  ‘I mean,’ Homer explained with a dignity he could not have achieved five minutes earlier, ‘that I am leaving for Europe almost at once and can take Mrs Clayborne with me. I am going to Brussels to attend the conference of the P.E.N.’

  The effect of these words was sensational. The shiny young man drew his breath in sharply. A new light had come into his eyes, which until then had had the icy glare of a district attorney cross-examining a shifty witness.

  ‘P.E.N.?’ He seemed stunned. ‘But you aren’t a writer.’

  ‘In my spare time I write occasional poetry.’

  ‘You do? Well, I’ll be darned. So do I.’

  ‘I find it soothing.’

  ‘Me, too. Keeps you from going loco in the rat race. Ever have any published?’

  ‘A few in the smaller magazines.’

  ‘Same here. They don’t pay much.’

  ‘No indeed.’

  ‘What sort do you do?’

  ‘Lyrical mainly.’

  ‘Mine are mostly songs of protest.’

  ‘I have never written a song of protest.’

  ‘You ought to try one some time.’

  The atmosphere in the manager’s sanctum had now changed completely, and essentially for the better. Homer, who had been regarding the shiny young man as a particularly noxious specimen of a younger generation with which he was never at his ease, took another look at him and immediately became aware of his many merits. The shiny young man, who had conceived at the outset an immediate distaste for Homer because he was so obviously rich — just, in fact, the sort of capitalist he wrote songs of protest about — saw in him now an unfortunate toad beneath the harrow who was more to be pitied than censured if his sisters kept getting pinched for shoplifting. The thing, in short, had taken on the quality of a love feast.

  ‘Look,’ said the shiny young man. No, away with evasion and circumlocution. His name was Duane Stottlemeyer, so let us call him Duane Stottlemeyer. ‘Look,’ said Duane Stottlemeyer, ‘hasn’t it struck you that it isn’t all such plain sailing as you seem to think? Seems to me you’re in a spot.’

  ‘I do not understand you.’

  ‘Well, look. You say you’re going to Brussels.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Taking the dame, I should say Mrs Clayborne, with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lots of department stores in Brussels,’ said Duane darkly.

  He had no need to labour his point. Homer got it without difficulty, and his jaw fell a notch. One cannot think of everything, and he had not thought of that. The arresting of shoplifters, like Art, knows no frontiers. A repugnance towards those who lift shops is common to all emporia, whether in the United States of America or on the other side of the ocean. There rose before his eyes a picture of his sister Bernadette with a Belgian store detective attached to each arm and stolen goods dribbling out of all her pockets being hauled to the office of a manager who would not be an old college friend of his. It was a vision to daunt the stoutest brother. He stared at Duane Stottlemeyer, aghast.

  ‘But what can I do?’ he gasped, and Duane did not fail him. ‘I’ll tell you what I’d do if it was me,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t take her to Brussels.’

  ‘Then what —?’

  ‘I’d leave her in England. Not in London, naturally. That would be just asking for it.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘In one of those country houses
where they take in paying guests. Plenty of them around these days. Matter of fact, there was an advertisement of one in the New Yorker only last week. A place of the name of Mellingham Hall. I happened to notice it because I’d heard a man I know speak of it when he was over here. Jerry West. English fellow. Came to play in the amateur golf championship. When he was in New York, he had a card for my dub, and I saw a good deal of him. He said that if I was ever going across, I ought to stay at this place. An uncle of his runs it, a guy called Scrope. What’s the matter? Does the name ring a bell?’

  Homer’s face had lit up, as far as his type of face, the suet-pudding type, is capable of lighting up.

  ‘The Scrope you mention is the brother of Willoughby Scrope, a London lawyer with whom I have been associated on several occasions. It all comes back to me. I remember now hearing Willoughby Scrope speak of his brother Crispin and this house of his. It is quite a historic place, I believe.’

  ‘Not near any department stores?’

  ‘No, a long distance from London. In the depths of the country.’

  ‘Sounds just what you want.’

  ‘It could not be better. Willoughby Scrope can make all the arrangements for me. I will telephone him tomorrow. I don’t know how to thank you.’

  ‘Just the Stottlemeyer service. ‘The what service?’

  ‘My name is Stottlemeyer.’

  ‘Oh, how do you do, Mr Stottlemeyer.’

  ‘How do you do,’ said Duane.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  It was shortly after this beautiful friendship had sprung up between Homer Pyle and Duane Stottlemeyer, a friendship which was to lead to them exchanging cards at Christmas and sending each other copies of their poems, that a nice-looking young man with ginger hair made his appearance at London’s Queen’s Bench Division 3 Court in the Strand. This was Gerald Godfrey Francis West, the Jerry West of whom Duane had spoken, and he had not come, one hastens to say, to stand in the dock and answer criminal charges. He had been summoned for jury duty, a thing that might happen to the best of us, and was about to sit on a hard bench and diligently enquire and true presentment make, as the legal slang has it.

  The jury took their places in the box; the official whose job it was to keep the court stuffy made it stuffier; and Jerry, gazing at the girl at the far end of the row in which he sat, became more convinced than ever that the odd illusion of having been struck on the frontal bone by an atom bomb, experienced by him on his initial glimpse of her, had been due to love at first sight. It happens that way sometimes. A’s love for B, or for the matter of that C’s love for D, often requiring long months before it comes to the boil, can occasionally start functioning with the sudden abruptness of one of those explosions in a London street which slay six. There seems to be no fixed rule.

  She was a girl of trim and dean-cut appearance, the open-air type. He could picture her poised on the high board at the swimming pool, about to make a dive so expert that it would scarcely ruffle the surface of the water. He could see her driving a golf ball two hundred yards down the middle, a practice to which he himself was greatly addicted. She was also, he thought, though as yet he could not true presentment make, good at tennis. Her hair was a sort of soft brown, her chin firm and rounded. She was too far away for him to note the colour of her eyes, but he knew instinctively that they were just the colour eyes ought to be.

  Ironical, he reflected, that when the jury summons reached him he had cursed so peevishly. An artist by profession, specializing in comic cartoons, he liked, when not playing golf, to devote the day to the practice of his art, and it was just his luck, he had felt, that he was not a borough treasurer, a registered dentist, a gaoler’s sub-officer or one of the Brethren of Trinity House, for these pampered pets of the System are for some reason exempted from jury duty. Had he known that the summoners were also summoning girls like this one, how different his reception of their invasion of his privacy would have been.

  What he and she and ten other males and females who were not registered dentists had come to sit in judgement on was the case of Onapoulos and Onapoulos versus the Lincolnshire and Eastern Counties Glass Bottling Corporation, one of those dull disputes between business firms where counsel keep handing books to the Judge and asking his lordship with the greatest respect to cast an eye on the passage marked in pencil on the right-hand page, upon which he immediately looks at the left-hand page. (‘Who is this Mr Jones? I have nothing about him in my notes.’

  ‘Your lordship is looking at the wrong page. If your lordship would kindly look at the right-hand page instead of the left-hand page.’

  ‘But why should I not look at the left-hand page?’

  ‘Because, my lord, with great deference there is nothing there concerning this .particular case.’) The only thing that kept Jerry from finding the proceedings intolerably tedious was the fortunate circumstance that the Judge, the counsel for the defence and several others of those present had richly comic faces, if some of them could be called faces at all, and he was able to occupy himself by making sketches of them in his note-book.

  Emil Onapoulos was being cross-examined now concerning a verbal agreement alleged to have been made on November the fourth of the previous year, and Jerry saw a set look come into the face of the girl he loved, as if witness’s responses were not satisfying her. Once or twice she pursed her attractive lips and her attractive nose gave a meaningful twitch. She seemed to be saying to herself that if he expected to have the ladies and gentlemen of the jury with him, Emil would have to do better than this.

  His admiration of her became intensified. Here plainly was a girl who had everything — not only good at golf, swimming and tennis, but one with solid brains who could sift and weigh evidence, a girl whose swift intelligence enabled her to understand what the hell all these cryptic blighters were talking about, a thing which he himself had long since given up hope of doing.

  Ages passed. Suddenly with a start of surprise — he was putting the finishing touches to his sketch of counsel for the defence at the moment — he found that the lawyers had had their say and that the jury was being requested to retire and consider its verdict.

  The foreman called the meeting to order, and the arbiters of the fate of two Onapouloses and probably dozens of glass bottlers, for these glass bottlers breed like rabbits, especially in Lincolnshire and the eastern counties, began to express their opinions.

  As is customary on these occasions, they varied from the fairly fatuous to the completely fatuous. It was left to the girl to take command of the proceedings. In a clear, musical voice which sounded to Jerry like the song of birds in the shrubbery of some old-world garden at eventide she indicated the course a conscientious jury was morally bound to take.

  She was, it appeared, one hundred per cent for the glass bottlers. If she had been the affectionate niece of one of the company’s vice-presidents, she could not have been more definite in her views.

  She swayed her hearers from the start, especially Jerry. To say that he followed her reasoning would be an overstatement, but he agreed with every word of it. A Daniel come to judgement, he was saying to himself. He had no shadow of a doubt about following her lead. What was good enough for her, he felt, was good enough for him. He was sorry for Johnny Halliday, the Onapoulos’s counsel, who was a personal friend of his, but fiat justitia, ruat coelum, as the fellow said, and a barrister of Johnny’s experience must long ago have learned the lesson that you can’t win ‘em all. Without hesitation he added his contribution to the unanimous vote, and the diligent enquirers filed back into court to bring the glass bottlers the glad news which would send them strewing roses — or possibly bottles — from their hats all over Lincolnshire and the eastern counties.

  2

  Except for the Gadarene swine, famous though the ages for their prowess at the short sprint, no group is quicker off the mark than a jury at long last released from bondage, and in the stampede for the door Jerry and the girl were swept apart. But he ca
ught up with her in the street outside and opened the conversation with an ingratiating cough.

  Too often when a devout lover has worshipped from afar and is afforded for the first time a close-up of the adored object, there is a sense of disappointment on his part. Jerry had no such feeling. She had appealed to his depths at long range, and she appealed to them even more now that they were standing face to face. Her eyes, he saw as she turned, were a sort of brown with golden lights in them and absolutely perfect, as he had known they would be.

  She greeted him as if he were an old friend.

  ‘Oh, hullo. You were on the jury, weren’t you?’ she said, and it surprised and pleased Jerry that she should have remembered him. Yes, he said, he had been on the jury, adding that he had had no alternative.

  ‘The summons told me not to hereof fail, and I wasn’t taking any chances. I wonder what they do to you if you hereof fail.’

  ‘I believe they get awfully annoyed.’

  ‘Something lingering with boiling oil in it?’

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Not that it could be much worse than having to sit through a trial like that one.’

  ‘Were you bored?’

  ‘Stiff.’

  ‘Poor Mr… Poor Mr what?’

  ‘Poor Mr West. Poor Mr G. G. F. West!’

  ‘It is too bad it affected you like that. I enjoyed it myself. But I’m surprised that you should have been bored. You seemed so interested.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I saw you making notes very intently all the time in your note-book. I was tremendously impressed.’

  ‘Not notes. Sketches. I was drawing the Judge and other freaks.’

  ‘Are you an artist?’

  ‘Sort of. Cartoons mostly.’

  ‘Well, that’s better than painting Russian princesses lying in the nude on tiger skins.’

  ‘Why do you specify that?’

  ‘It’s what an aunt of mine who lives in Bournemouth thinks artists do. What kind of cartoons? Comic?’