Birthday Party

by C. H. B. Kitchin

  The Sterilisation Front

  Our second machine began its pacific operations on February 1st. It is still too early to produce any statistics as to the decline of fecundity induced by its beneficent rays, but we can assure our readers that our first machine (to which full reference was made in our previous number) has already aroused consternation among the heads of the governments affected. Already they envisage their enormous military roads deserted except for dotards too weak even to salute, the rusty cannon hungering in vain for fodder. Despite the most rigorous searches by the secret police, no trace of the machine has been found. Sobbing women crowd the doctors’ consulting-rooms, complaining that their husbands . . .

  Is it true, I wonder, that two or three embassies sent in a protest? At any rate, it’s not surprising he was almost sent down. Just, I suppose, when he felt he’d had enough and thought it would be nicer to go right away and spend his money in earnest. March in the West Indies, then Bermuda till it bores him. Very nice. I hardly feel we should have anything to say to one another now. He’s a different person from the Bunny who ran right through my schooldays like a chink of light coming through a door that one was glad to have open. He’s changed, and I feel I’m exactly the same, except that I like fewer things. Well, I’ve got Dan Cruttley and Dicky Brench in exchange. Not that they mean so much to me as Bunny meant—but, after all, when one grows up, things are bound to mean less to one. A box of toy soldiers, when you’re ten, gives you a much keener pleasure than a Rolls-Royce when you’re twenty. Or it ought to. As we grow older we lose that pernicious egoism which makes childhood and second childhood ages of irresponsibility. We realise, if we realise anything at all, that the purpose of our existence lies outside us.

  Labour and Art.

  3

  The clocks of Oxford striking twelve, overlapping, jangling up the noon of the last Sunday morning of my last term but one. A memory to carry away—these noisy clocks of Oxford—and use when—when . . .

  Why carry away any memory at all? Live in the present. Make yourself each moment do the serviceable thing. I must bully myself out of these habits of retrospection, even at the risk of being thought a prig, or too zealous a convert to the new religion. Otherwise, I shall flop. I shall suddenly see myself sitting in the library at Carlice, looking at that very lovely view, and listening to a Sibelius symphony on the gramophone, and I shall think—or rather feel, since the image will be so intense—“this house is mine, this view is mine, this kind of life is mine—anyway till the catastrophe.” And I shall give way, and acquiesce and just live there like a cultivated dilettante, doing little charities to ease my conscience, and being, oh, so considerate to Dora and more creditable than Aunt Isabel would have thought possible. That’s my danger. I’ve got to bring myself up in a harder school. Evidently the two schools I went to weren’t hard enough.

  I’ve got to think this out, carefully and decisively. I’ve only one more vac., already accounted for, before schools and my second in Greats, and I go down and such fun as there is is over. What then? A small but natty flat in town where I can go to so-and-so’s chambers and read law, rather lazily, and long week-ends at Carlice, with Dora still keeping house for me? A bit hard-up perhaps, but only because one has “got to keep up appearances.” Why should I keep up appearances? Why should I bother with any convention that doesn’t tally with the future development of society? Why shouldn’t I show them?

  Then give up Carlice in September as soon as you’re twenty-one.

  Give it to whom? To Aunt Isabel? No, thank you. I don’t see why she should come and sit there on a feudal throne. I know, of course, that if I stepped out, she’d very soon step in. (And yet, what is Carlice, after all? Beyond being marked in Gothic letters on the ordnance map, it’s a very ordinary little country house. It takes a real antiquarian or a snob to be excited by our meagre ruins.) No. I’ll not have Carlice turned into the niche in which she can nourish her egotism. I used to think she had no sense of duty, but she’s full of it—duty towards herself. She regards it as not only agreeable, but as morally right that people in uniform should hand her things on silver trays. She puts luxury before comfort—for moral reasons. No one is more able than she to sit bolt upright for hours in a hard-bottomed chair. She faces draughts that would give other people neuralgia for a month. She can live, if necessary, on a starvation diet. She can work in the garden like a factory-hand, keeping an infinity of sweated hours. She goes to inordinate lengths to help the local poor—a blanket here, here a jelly or a nutritious soup—provided there’s that hint of a curtsey when she’s finished her errand—provided that the essential demarcations are preserved. No sybarite, Aunt Isabel. And for that very reason, how much more dangerous and damnable. I feel, oddly enough, that since I have learnt her great secret, I have her in my power. She regards people she doesn’t know, not as people, but as things.

  The personal point of view—which will only be destroyed when we destroy personality. But we shall destroy it.

  No. I shall not step out and let Aunt Isabel step in. Rather leave Dora there as caretaker—Dora, who could be “liquidated” with a word or two. If our behaviour towards human individuals is of any importance—I mean as regards particular acts of kindness and forbearance without any general social purpose—I have acquired a good deal of merit in my behaviour to Dora. I realised a long time ago that she was in a difficult position. One might almost say, a false position. I don’t think I have ever presumed on it. I never took the liberties with her which one would have taken with a real mother. I’ve observed all her little domestic taboos. I’ve made a great show of never questioning her authority. When that aged bore Sir Thomas Hill took me aside one day and asked me whether I approved of certain items in the Carlice budget, I answered that I wanted Auntie Dora to use her absolute discretion about such things till I was twenty-one. And when, perhaps trying to make mischief, he suggested that Aunt Isabel didn’t see eye to eye with Dora over this and that, I went the whole hog for Dora. “Aunt Isabel doesn’t live here,” I said. “She didn’t marry my father. I could never see why she was left as one of my guardians by my father’s will.” He hummed and hawed and tried to indicate that doubtlessly my father had seen that Dora had hardly the experience to run a place “of this kind.” (Always this harping on Carlice being a place!) I said that at all events she’d had plenty of time to gain the necessary experience since my father’s death. He pretended to agree and we changed the subject.

  No. Dora has nothing to reproach me with. She knows that. In her way, I think she’s rather fond of me. If I were ill, she’d do everything that she ought to do—less efficiently than Aunt Isabel, but with much more genuine feeling. It’s pathetic to see how she tries to reserve the first-fruits of the place for me—how she keeps back the hothouse strawberries and the early asparagus till I am there to eat them, and how, since I’ve been living out of College, she sends me these forced narcissi and special little hampers during term-time, new-laid eggs, mushrooms in season, new peas, globe artichokes, home-grown celery—all the tit-bits of the estate. When I’m at home, she surrounds me with a multitude of petits soins. It was she who had central heating carried up to that lovely big room on the first floor, now called my library, where I can play Sibelius privately on the gramophone and look out of the big Georgian windows at my own delightful view—that library where I am spoilt and tempted to become something which I know categorically I ought not to become. The library at Carlice which shall not seduce me, any more than the gunroom at Carlice shall lead me to commit suicide like my father.

  When I’m twenty-one, if I’m not married—and at present I see no likelihood of that—I shall keep Auntie Dora on as caretaker of Carlice, if she likes to stay. But I shall keep her there with the clear understanding that, probably sooner than later, she’ll have to go away and live on her five hundred a year from my father, and the two or three hundred she has of her own. It’s no pit
tance after all. And she might easily marry again—some slightly seedy professional man whom she’d meet at a superior boarding-house. I can’t let her—or even my library—stand in the way of what’s got to be done, when I see it more clearly. If they want Carlice for a Labour Summer School, they can have it. If Carlice should be sold and the proceeds given to Abyssinia, it shall be sold. (By the way, the news from Abyssinia isn’t so rosy now.) I feel myself already pointed out as a “young man with great possessions.” This I do vow—by all the clocks of Oxford now chiming a quarter past twelve—my great possessions shall never get me down.

  Even this is put too personally. What does it matter whether I fail morally or not? My own private moral perfection isn’t an end in itself. It’s a means merely to a wider purpose. It’s failure in action, not in morals that I must worry about. What a good thing I’m going that walk with Dicky Brench this afternoon. I need a dose of his scientific materialism, to keep me straight, and counteract my hereditary virus. Dan Cruttley’s no use. He’s only a Liberal in new clothes.

  (Suppose I offered Carlice Abbey to Bunny? His people had no place. Plenty of money to keep it up with, a historical background and Gothic lettering on the map. In exchange, a bit of the sweated Andrews millions going back to the workers who made them. It’s not a bad idea.)

  If only there were a living authority to tell one what to do—a Socialist Pope in whom would be incarnated the Collective Will, with a voice like Jehovah’s and a finger that would write flaming letters in the sky! Conscience? What’s that but the secretion of a few sluggish glands?

  4

  As usual, I have forgotten Joan. Twenty-four and still no sign of a marriage in the offing, despite her season in London. Well, poor girl, she isn’t pretty and she hasn’t got a fortune. What has she to offer beyond a pleasant disposition and the fact that she was brought up in a place? Not enough, in these days—at least for the kind of man they would like her to marry. And she’s so fastidious about men. She notices their voices, their fingernails, bits of scurf in their hair, the smell of their clothes, and disapproves. She was happiest when she went off with Doris Hawkes and did her chicken-farming. “It won’t last,” said Auntie Dora. It lasted nearly three years, and they didn’t lose as much as one would have thought probable. It might still be lasting if Doris hadn’t leapt into matrimony with bounder Benson. No doubt Joan went through more than we realised, turning up again at Carlice with a wry smile and some very dowdy clothes. “Now,” she said, “I suppose I’ve got to marry too.”

  I remember her sitting, the evening of her return, in the morning-room and tapping her big feet on the stone fender. Dora looked up from the blue jumper she was knitting and said, “Why, dear? You feel at home here, don’t you?” And Joan gave a mannish kind of gulp and said, “Frankly, I don’t know that I do.” Then Dora said at great length how glad she would be to have Joan’s help and company, and how she hoped that, until my marriage—this with a quick arch look—Joan would feel herself full mistress of the house, as she would have been if my father hadn’t married again. And Joan, as soon as she could, got up and went to her bedroom. And Dora turned confidingly to me and said, “We must do something to help her, Ronnie. She seems to be missing her farm and Doris terribly. Don’t you know any young men, Ronnie, whom she might like?”

  “Do I know any young men who might like her?” I answered, a little too brutally perhaps. “My friends are about my own age. I don’t think I know anyone who isn’t two years younger than Joan.”

  “Well, two years isn’t much.”

  “Did you ever think men marriageable who were two years younger than you, Auntie Dora? I mean, when you were in the early twenties.”

  She blushed, and said with a toss of the head, “It didn’t occur to me to think of men as marriageable or not. It was enough for them to think me marriageable. What a horrid word, anyway.”

  “There you had the advantage of Joan,” I replied, rather precociously for a boy of nineteen. (I see it now. How I have grown up during the last eighteen months!)

  “Well, she’s a pretty attractive girl, and after all . . .”

  “She isn’t pretty, Auntie Dora. You know that. And what does ‘after all’ mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps I was thinking of your family. And she’ll have some money of her own. She would make a very good wife, if she found the right man.”

  I couldn’t help feeling that Dora would have liked to say, “If Mr. Right came along.” But it isn’t often, nowadays, that she lets the idiom of South Mersley come out.

  “That’s the point,” I said, being suddenly bored with the conversation, “she’s got to find the right man. Meanwhile, she’ll probably find it isn’t too bad living here. And Aunt Isabel may have something to suggest.”

  In due course, Aunt Isabel suggested giving Joan a season in London. Joan had her season, and nothing came of it that we could see. And since then, since we were all plotting like a petit bourgeois French family about their daughter’s future, I’ve changed my views a good deal, and really can’t bother myself as to whether Joan makes a dynastic marriage or not. Incidentally, Doris’ experiment with bounder Benson doesn’t seem to have been much of a success. Perhaps that example is keeping Joan back. Well, if she marries, she marries, and if she doesn’t, she can stay on at Carlice with Dora as long as it’s kept going. I want her to be happy— probably, inside me, I want her to have more than her fair share of happiness—but I can’t let these so-called family ties interfere with the essential things of life. She’ll have her five hundred a year—till the big crash comes. She’s healthy and not unintelligent. She’s as capable as most people of making a living. I don’t see that I’m called to make my arrangements fit hers.

  Good Lord! Is that Dan, coming to return the Leviathan already? No, it isn’t his step. It must be Browne going up to his attic. Coming back from Chapel, I suppose. Well, a fine morning I’ve spent. Almost as uselessly as if I’d been to Chapel too. There’s still another half-hour before lunch.

  Labour and Art.

  Chapter III: DORA CARLICE

  1

  OH, these sheets of rain—they are like sheets, dirty damp sheets on a clothes-line—flapping one after the other over the garden, breaking down the daffodils and ruining them for the house. I’m sure it’s wetter here than it is anywhere else. And windier, too. What was the name of that old man who wrote in some famous book, “The most remarkable feature of Carlice Abbey is that it was built not on low ground beside a stream, but on something of a hill”? Claude told me that the first time I came here. I wish it wasn’t built on something of a hill. It makes everything so draughty. There’s that window open again in this storm, and the curtain waving about outside. Drenched. It’s absolutely drenched, and the dye is running. It just shows you can’t believe a word they say. I really ought to stop it out of Flora’s wages. If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a hundred times that as soon as there’s any sign of rain she must go round the windows and close them—particularly on this side of the house, which catches it so.

  “No, Flora. You’re late again. I’ve just come in and closed that window. As it is, I’m afraid that curtain’s spoilt. Yes, I think you’d better take it down. You see, it’s wringing wet . . .”

  A new curtain last Christmas. It is a shame. Another chance for Isabel to talk about shoddy modern fabrics. She’s never liked this room since I did it up. Perhaps that’s a good thing, because it makes it really my room. I think I shall call it “the boudoir” instead of “the drawing-room.” After all, we use the morning-room as our living-room. Ronnie has his big library upstairs. And Joan has her nice bed-sitting-room. The arrangement has worked out very well. What a fool I was not to make myself thoroughly at home years ago, instead of living here like a visitor or a poor relation. Well, old girl, you know why that was, don’t you? Now that something’s going to happen soon, the w
hole business seems so stale and silly that I can’t really bother myself about it. I shall simply say, “Here you are, Ronnie. I don’t care twopence what’s inside this old box, or what you think.” No, I shan’t, though. I shall go trembly at the knees again, and nearly faint as I nearly fainted during that talk with Thomas Hill on Ronnie’s last birthday—his twentieth. And when his twenty-first comes round, perhaps I shall quite faint. But it’ll be for the last time. As things you dread come nearer, you dread them less. But I wish Thomas Hill wasn’t coming for Easter. He looks at you like a doctor who suspects you of concealing a bad habit. I’ve always been afraid of doctors, starting with Daddy. Perhaps that explains why I fell so hopelessly for Don.

  What a day! Sheets of rain still flapping over the lawns and beating down the daffodils. Not quite as many as last year, though I did pick off the seed-pods. The year before, when I told Isabel I thought the daffs were getting a little thinner, she said it was because I hadn’t picked the seed-pods. It’s one of the many things gardeners never do, according to her. Well, it wasn’t as bad as when I told Jackson to mow them off before the leaves began to wither. That, I found, was a terrible mistake. It kills them. But they were so straggly, and how was I to know? At Elmcroft we had new daffodils every year. Only a few dozen, of course. Isabel says that while she was here she planted eighteen thousand herself. I wonder if she did.