Plum Pie

by P. G. Wodehouse

  But I knew, and it was with a heavy heart that I reached in my hip pocket for the thin little bundle of pound notes which I had been hoping would last me for another week.

  Our Man in America

  Crime continues to flourish in and around New York, but what with one thing and another the pickings are not so easy as they used to be. There is a nasty sneaky spirit afoot among those who have anything worth stealing, the principal offenders being banks. There was a time when you could always enrich yourself by getting a gun and going into a bank and asking for money and having it passed to you across the counter, but these idyllic conditions no longer prevail. The other day a marauder, full of optimism, went into a bank and started the correspondence system which has always been in vogue by slipping the cashier a note that said ‘Put $25,000 in fives and tens in a paper bag. If you give the alarm, I shall kill you instantly'. And the cashier, instead of obliging, scribbled a reply on a handy piece of paper and pushed it over to him. The message ran: Straighten your tie and smile. You're being photographed.'

  About the only thing in the crime line that pays off nowadays is forgery. At Ripley, Tennessee, a Mr. Howard Lee White, serving a sentence for that crime in the Fort Pillow state prison, was released last Saturday after the necessary papers had been received by the authorities. It turned out—too late—that Mr. White had forged these.

  "Nothing. like this has ever happened here before," said Warden J. B. Hunt.

  One gets new experiences. Nor was this all. Since Mr. White left, officials say a man answering his description has left a trail of cheques forged on the prison account all over Tennessee.

  *

  But while life is all roses and sunshine for Howard Lee White, there are aching hearts up in Washington, where the White House is having a good deal of starling trouble. These birds collect in gangs on the building and in the trees, and it is reported by a source close to the President that the President has been saying that if he never sees another starling in his life, it will be all right with him.

  Washington's keenest minds are trying to hit on a way of de-birding the premises, and the latest scheme is to make a recording of the cries of a distressed starling and play it where the intruders have assembled, the idea being that when they hear it they will feel that this is no place for them and that they had better leg it while the legging is good.

  Sound as far as it goes, but the problem, of course, is how do you distress a starling? It is no good kidding it that the Stock Market has slumped again, because probably it has no shares on margin. You might climb up a tree and pretend to be a cat, hoping that this would draw a sharp shriek of dismay, but in order to do this you would have to look reasonably like a cat, which very few Senators, even when whiskered, do. One wishes one could help out the Administration, but really there seems nothing that one can suggest. Impasse is the word that springs to the lips.

  *

  According to Howard Gossage, the well-known advertising man, a new and speedier race of humans may be developing as the result of Television commercials, a species that can nip out of the room while the commercial is on, get back when it is over and, as the fellow said, fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run. He instances the case of a twelve-year-old nephew of his, who on May 10 last, just as the commercial was starting went to the kitchen, prepared a peanut butter sandwich, drank half pint of milk out of the bottle, was rebuked by his mother for this, promised he wouldn't do it again, stroked the cat, patted the dog, and had a fight with his brother, all in 52.3 seconds, returning exactly at the right time for the resumption of the main show.

  Interviewed, the child said he had only done what any man would have done. These pioneers are always modest.

  *

  It has come as something of a shock to New York motorists to learn that the money they have been depositing in parking meters throughout the city all these months has not gone into the pockets of the Transit Authority (whom they love) but into those of a total stranger named Giuseppe Mancini. The thought that they have been supporting Giuseppe to the tune of about $150,000 a year, and that while they have had to rub along on hamburgers he has been tucking into oysters and caviar, is a bitter one.

  When a year or so ago Giuseppe got fired from his job as a, parking meter maintenance man, he shrewdly stuck like glue to his official key, guaranteed to open five hundred meters in the Third Avenue area, and with its aid he proceeded to clean up, doing a nice $200o-a-night business: and at first sight it would seem that he has provided an answer to the question "What shall we do with our boys?" Obviously, one would say, get them jobs as parking-meter maintenance men in New York, and let Nature do the rest.

  But there is one bad catch in this thing of robbing meters. Parking fees are paid in dimes—ten to the dollar—and while dimes are all right if you can take them or leave them alone, it is embarrassing to have a million five hundred thousand of them about the home, as Giuseppe had. If you pay all your bills in dimes, people begin to ask questions. No doubt it was when he bought a $20,000 house in the country and—presumably—slapped down two hundred thousand dimes on the house agent's desk that suspicions began to be aroused. At any rate, four gentlemanly detectives jumped on the back of his neck last week as he staggered up Third Avenue with approximately twenty thousand of these coins on his person, and it is very doubtful if he will be with us again until early in the next decade.

  *

  And here is the latest news from Statesboro, Ga. They have a prison down there, and last Sunday the chaplain was conducting divine service for the inmates.

  "Let us now," he said, "bow our heads in prayer."

  The prisoners and warders bowed their heads as directed—all except John Patterson (30) and Joseph Gibson (22), who slipped out and went off in a lorry and have not been heard from since.

  5 Bingo Bans the Bomb

  As Bingo Little left the offices of Wee Tots, the weekly journal which has done so much to mould thought in the nurseries of Great Britain, his brow was furrowed and his heart heavy. The evening was one of those fine evenings which come to London perhaps twice in the course of an English summer, but its beauty struck no answering chord in his soul. The skies were blue, but he was bluer. The sun was smiling, but he could not raise so much as a simper.

  When his wife and helpmeet, Rosie M. Banks the popular novelist, had exerted her pull and secured for him the Wee Tots editorship, she had said it would be best not to haggle about salary but to take what Henry Cuthbert Purkiss, its proprietor, offered, and he had done so, glad to have even the smallest bit of loose change to rattle in his pocket. But recently there had been unforeseen demands on his purse. Misled by a dream in which he had seen his Aunt Myrtle (relict of late J. G. Beenstock) dancing the Twist in a bikini bathing suit outside Buckingham Palace, he had planked his month's stipend on Merry Widow for the two-thirty at Catterick Bridge, and it had come in fifth in a field of seven. This disaster had left him with a capital of four shillings and threepence, so he had gone to Mr. Purkiss and asked for a raise, and Mr. Purkiss had stared at him incredulously.

  "A what?" he cried, wincing as if some unfriendly tooth had bitten him in the fleshy part of the leg.

  "Just to show your confidence in me and encourage me to rise to new heights of achievement," said Bingo. "It would be money well spent," he pointed out, tenderly picking a piece of fluff off Mr. Purkiss's coat sleeve, for everything helps on these occasions.

  No business resulted. There were, it seemed, many reasons why Mr. Purkiss found himself unable to accede to the request. He placed these one by one before his right-hand man, and an hour or so later, his daily task completed, the right-hand man went on his way, feeling like a left-hand man.

  He told himself that he had not really hoped, for Mr. Purkiss notoriously belonged to—indeed, was the perpetual president of—the slow-with-a-buck school of thought and no one had ever found it easy to induce him to loosen up, but nevertheless the disappointment was substantial. And wh
at put the seal on his depression was that Mrs. Bingo was not available to console him. In normal circumstances he would have hastened to her and cried on her shoulder, but she was unfortunately not among those present. She had gone with Mrs. Purkiss to attend the Founder's Day celebrations at the Brighton seminary where they had been educated and would not be back till tomorrow.

  It looked like being a bleak evening. He was in no mood for revelry, but even if he had been, he would have found small scope for it on four shillings and threepence. It seemed to him that his only course was to go to the Drones for a bite of dinner and then return to his lonely home and so to bed, and he was passing through Trafalgar Square en route for Dover Street, where the club was situated, when a sharp exclamation or cry at his side caused him to halt, and looking up he saw that what had interrupted his reverie was a redhaired girl of singular beauty who had that indefinable air of being ready to start something at the drop of a hat which redhaired girls in these disturbed times so often have.

  "Oh, hullo," he said, speaking with the touch of awkwardness customary in young husbands accosted by beautiful girls when their wives are away. He had had no difficulty in recognising her. Her name was Mabel Murgatroyd, and they had met during a police raid on the gambling club they were attending in the days before modern enlightened thought made these resorts legal, and had subsequently spent an agreeable half hour together in a water barrel in somebody's garden. He had not forgotten the incident, and it was plain that it remained green in Miss Murgatroyd's memory also, for she said:

  "Well, lord love a duck, if it isn't my old room mate Bingo Little! Fancy meeting you again. How's tricks? Been in any interesting water barrels lately?"

  Bingo said No, not lately.

  "Nor me. I don't know how it is with you, but I've sort of lost my taste for them. The zest has gone. When you've seen one, I often say, you've seen them all. But there's always something to fill the long hours. I'm going in more for politics these days."

  "What, standing for Parliament?"

  "No, banning the bomb and all that."

  “What bomb would that be?"

  "The one that's going to blow us all crosseyed unless steps are taken through the proper channels."

  "Ah yes, I know the bomb you mean. No good to man or beast."

  "That's what we feel. When I say 'we', I allude to certain of the younger set, of whom I am one. We're protesting against it. Every now and then we march from Aldermaston, protesting like a ton of bricks."

  "Hard on the feet."

  "But very satisfying to the soul. And then we sit a good deal."

  "Sit?"

  "That's right."

  "Sit where?"

  "Wherever we happen to be. Here, to take an instance at random."

  "What, in the middle of Trafalgar Square? Don't the gendarmerie object?"

  "You bet they do. They scoop us up in handfuls."

  "Is that good?"

  "Couldn't be better. The papers feature it next morning, and that helps the cause. Ah, here comes a rozzer now, just when we need him. Down with you," said Mabel Murgatroyd, and seizing Bingo by the wrist she drew him with her to the ground, causing sixteen taxi cabs, three omnibuses and eleven private cars to halt in their tracks, their drivers what-the-hell-ing in no uncertain terms.

  It was a moment fraught with discomfort for Bingo. Apart from the fact that all this was doing his trousers no good, he had the feeling that he was making himself conspicuous, a thing he particularly disliked, and in this assumption he was perfectly correct. The suddenness of his descent, too, had made him bite his tongue rather painfully.

  But these were, after all, minor inconveniences. What was really disturbing him was the approach of the Government employee to whom his companion had alluded. He was coming alongside at the rate of knots, and his aspect was intimidating to the last degree. His height Bingo estimated at about eight1 feet seven, and his mood was plainly not sunny. Nor was this a thing to occasion surprise. For weeks he had been straining the muscles of his back lifting debutantes off London's roadways, and the routine had long since begun to afflict him with ennui. His hearty dislike of debutantes was, equalled only by his distaste for their escorts. So now without even saying "Ho" or "What's all this?" he attached himself to the persons of Bingo and Miss Murgatroyd and led them from the scene. And in next to no time Bingo found himself in one of Bosher Street's cosy prison cells, due to face the awful majesty of the law on the following morning.

  It was not, of course, an entirely novel experience for him. In his bachelor days he had generally found himself in custody on Boat Race night. But he was now a respectable married man and had said goodbye to all that, and it is not too much to say that he burned with shame and remorse. He was also extremely apprehensive. He knew the drill on these occasions. If you wished to escape seven days in the jug, you had to pay a fine of five pounds, and he doubted very much if the M.C. next morning would be satisfied with four shillings and threepence down and an I.O.U. for the remainder. And what Mrs. Bingo would have to say when informed on her return that he was in stir, he did not care to contemplate. She would unquestionably explode with as loud a report as the bomb which he had been engaged in banning.

  It was consequently with a surge of relief that nearly caused him to swoon that on facing the magistrate at Bosher Street Police Court he found him to be one of those likeable magistrates who know how to temper justice with mercy. Possibly because it was his birthday but more probably because he was influenced by Miss Murgatroyd's radiant beauty, he contented himself with a mere reprimand, and the erring couple were allowed to depart without undergoing the extreme penalty of the law.

  Joy, in short, had come in the morning, precisely as the psalmist said it always did, and it surprised Bingo that his fellow-lag seemed not to be elated. Her lovely face was pensive, as if there was something on her mind. In answer to his query as to why she was not skipping like the high hills she explained that she was thinking of her white-haired old father, George Francis Augustus Delamere, fifth Earl of Ippleton, whose existence at the time when she was making her Trafalgar Square protest had temporarily slipped her mind.

  "When he learns of this, he'll be fit to be tied," she said. "But why should he learn of it?"

  "He learns of everything. It's a sort of sixth sense. Have you any loved ones who will have criticisms to make?"

  "Only my wife, and she's away."

  "You're in luck," said Mabel Murgatroyd.

  Bingo could not have agreed with her more wholeheartedly. He and Mrs. Bingo had always conducted their domestic life on strictly turtle dove lines, but he was a shrewd enough student of the sex to know that you can push a turtle dove just so far. Rosie was the sweetest girl in a world where sweet girls are rather rare, but experience had taught him that, given the right conditions, she was capable of making her presence felt as perceptibly as one of those hurricanes which become so emotional on reaching Cape Hatteras. It was agreeable to think that there was no chance of her discovering that in her absence he had been hobnobbing in the dock at Bosher Street Police Court with red-haired girls of singular beauty.

  It was, accordingly, with the feeling that if this was not the best of all possible worlds, it would do till another came along that he made his way to the office of Wee Tots and lowered his trouser-seat into the editorial chair. He had slept only fitfully on the plank bed with which the authorities had provided him and he had had practically no breakfast, but he felt that the vicissitudes through which he had passed had made him a deeper, graver man, which is always a good thing. With a light heart he addressed himself to the morning's correspondence, collecting material for the Uncle Joe To His Chickabiddies page which was such a popular feature of the paper, and he was reading a communication from Tommy Bootle (aged twelve) about his angora rabbit Kenneth, when the telephone rang and Mrs. Bingo's voice floated over the wire.

  "Bingo?"

  "Oh, hullo, light of my life. When did you get back?"

  "Just now."


  "How did everything go?"

  "Quite satisfactorily."

  "Did Ma Purkiss make a speech?"

  "Yes, Mrs. Purkiss spoke."

  "Lots of the old college chums there, I suppose?"

  "Quite a number."

  "Must have been nice for you meeting them. No doubt you got together and swopped reminiscences of midnight feeds in the dormitory and what the Games Mistress said when she found Maud and Angela smoking cigars behind the gymnasium."

  "Quite. Bingo, have you seen the Mirror this morning?"

  "I have it on my desk, but I haven't looked at it yet."

  "Turn to Page Eight," said Mrs. Bingo, and there was a click as she rang off.

  Bingo did as directed, somewhat puzzled by her anxiety to have him catch up with his reading and also by a certain oddness he had seemed to detect in her voice. Usually it was soft and melodious, easily mistaken for silver bells ringing across a sunlit meadow in Springtime, but in the recent exchanges he thought he had sensed in it a metallic note, and it perplexed him.

  But not for long. Scarcely had his eyes rested on the page she had indicated when all was made clear to him and the offices of Wee Tots did one of those entrechats which Nijinsky used to do in the Russian ballet. It was as if the bomb Miss Murgatroyd disliked so much had been touched off beneath his swivel chair.

  Page Eight was mostly pictures. There was one of the Prime Minister opening a bazaar, another of a resident of Chipping Norton who had just celebrated his hundredth birthday, a third of students rioting in Pernambuco or Mozambique or somewhere. But the one that interested him was the one at the foot of the page. It depicted a large policeman with a girl of singular beauty in one hand and in the other a young man whose features, though somewhat distorted, he was immediately able to recognize. Newspaper photographs tend occasionally to be blurred, but this one was a credit to the artist behind the camera.