The Girl in Blue

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

T
he
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

I
t
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.