Birthday Party

by C. H. B. Kitchin

  Chapter V: ISABEL CARLICE

  JOAN is spending the night with me in London. To-morrow she is flying to the South of France to meet her great friend Mrs. Benson, with whom she used to breed poultry. Mrs. Benson has divorced her bounder of a husband in South Africa and is coming back to Joan and England via the Suez Canal. Joan will bring her home from Cannes and they will start some kind of farming again. She is excited and very happy.

  We are in full opera season. Lady Mawnan has lent me her box and her car, complete with chauffeur and footman. She does things handsomely. I had thought of asking a young man to join us, but Joan did not seem to want one. After all, a box is more comfortable with two in it than with three. It is insufferable with four. So we dined together here tête-à-tête and set off at leisure. Luckily it was one of those Italian operas that don’t spoil one’s dinner. I had the old red carpet put over the front steps. I wanted to see how much dignity it would give Joan as she got into the motor, but she just bundled herself in as if she were catching a bus in the Edgware Road.

  While we were driving to Covent Garden, I said, hoping for a reaction, “I think it’s so much pleasanter to see opera in a half-empty box than to pig it in the stalls.” Ronnie would have exploded, and reminded me of the queues of musical devotees who waited hours for a seat in the gallery, while there was I, a lazy, well-fed woman, caring very little for music, etc., etc. But Joan delivered no such tirade. She merely said “Yes,” and looked appraisingly at the crates of vegetables in Long Acre. A dull girl.

  She was dull, too, when I introduced her to people in the intervals. Sir Thomas Hill was there, with his sister and a very handsome nephew, and there were some agreeable youngish men in a large party which included Gwen Rashdall. I chatted with everyone I knew, trying deliberately to make the evening like a page from a “society paper.” Wasted effort. Joan hadn’t improved at all since the “season” she spent with me. But what does that matter?

  When we got back—she had refused all suggestions of supper—we sat in the drawing-room and talked for a long time. Dora, it seems, had done her best to make Joan promise to go to the Riviera by boat and train, and not to fly. Unless Joan flew, she would be too late to meet Mrs. Benson’s ship. She had got her aeroplane ticket, but perhaps she could get the money refunded. She wanted to fly very much. What did I think?

  “Well, my dear Joan, I think it’s entirely a matter for you. You’re well over twenty-one. Auntie Dora didn’t forbid you to fly?”

  “Oh no.”

  She laughed a little. Dora has never been successful at forbidding.

  “She asked you not to fly, as a favour?”

  “I suppose so. She said, ‘Oh, Joan dear, I’d so much rather you didn’t fly.’”

  “But you got your ticket for the aeroplane?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked shamefaced, like a school-girl reprimanded by her mistress.

  “I’m not blaming you,” I said.

  “Don’t you think Auntie Dora was being rather stupid?” she asked me. “Don’t you think it is really for me to decide?”

  “Yes. So long as I’m not responsible, if anything should go wrong. You’ve been born into this mechanical age, and sooner or later you’ll be forced to enjoy its so-called blessings. Have you ever flown before?”

  “Once, for a few minutes for five shillings. I don’t feel any nervousness myself. I’m looking forward to the trip. Why, old women fly to India and Cape Town every week. It’s ridiculous to hesitate. So far as Auntie Dora goes, we might be living at the time when Blériot was trying to fly the Channel.”

  She had worked herself up into a quick mood of anger, which I was glad to see.

  “Well, then, fly,” I said.

  “You really mean that?” she asked gratefully.

  I said I did mean it, and she sighed with relief.

  “If you’d objected, too, I shouldn’t have done it,” she said.

  There was a pause, while I urged her to mix herself a gin and barley-water. She did so, awkwardly, making a mess on the tray.

  “And what about this farming of yours?” I asked her, when she had settled down again. “What have you arranged?”

  “Only the vague plan.”

  “But you’re bent on trying it again?”

  “Oh, absolutely. After all, my last effort wasn’t too bad, and we shall have more capital this time. You don’t disapprove, Aunt Isabel?”

  “Oh, not for the world.”

  “—or think it unwise?”

  “Well, I should have to know a good deal more about it, before I could give you my views as to the wisdom of it. Why exactly are you doing it? Because you like it, or to make a living? Or both?”

  “Both—and, oh well, there’s a third reason.”

  I had often heard that kind of “Oh well” from young women on the stage. Evidently the expression is really used. It may have spread from the stage to normal conversation. Generally it is a prelude to an important line of thought.

  “What is your third reason?” I asked.

  “It’s a bit difficult to explain to you,” she began.

  (“It must be some kind of complex,” I thought.)

  “But I do feel,” she went on, “that I can’t only live for myself. I should like to feel that I am really doing something. Of course, you will say that I’ve been influenced by Ronnie. Perhaps I have, though I don’t agree with him entirely. I know that a lot of what he says is simply undergraduate nonsense. But some of it sticks.”

  “You mean,” I said, trying to make my voice sound amiable, “you want to do something for humanity in general?”

  “That’s putting it too priggishly, Aunt Isabel.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s my fault. But it is rather what you mean, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, up to a point. It must be a good thing if there are more chickens and eggs in the world—and in England, especially—if we’re going to have a war.”

  I agreed, though I forbore to tell her, that if such was her chief motive, she ought to join some large organisation where poultry farming is carried on with scientific economy. Being joint-boss with Mrs. Benson was indulging in a personal luxury of which she ought to have disapproved. But I hadn’t the heart to make her be too logical.

  “You feel,” I said, “that the personal life—for your own spiritual and material gain, and that of your friends—is impossible. Yet most of the people whom we admire have lived it. This community-urge is quite a mushroom phase.”

  “What do you feel, Aunt Isabel?” she asked.

  “Why should you suppose I have ever thought about such things?”

  “Ronnie says you are dangerously intelligent.”

  “Why dangerously? Because I don’t agree with him, I suppose. Well, I have thought about it, and, on the whole, I think his view is all nonsense. It would take me a long time to tell you why.”

  I paused, realising I had got to make some attempt at it, and she said, “I wish you would.”

  “I can only give you some of my reasons,” I said. “Others will occur to me when I’m in bed to-night, or in my bath to-morrow morning. I shall be so eloquent to myself when you’re not here—when you’re flying over France to meet Mrs. Benson.”

  Her eyes lit up with joy at the thought of it.

  “In the first place,” I went on, “—and this is a piece of my inner philosophy, which I shall never be able to set down altogether in print—I don’t see why anybody should have to ‘justify his existence,’ as the saying goes. We’ve been born without being consulted. It’s for the universe to justify itself to me, not the other way round. In practice, of course, one compromises. But I won’t waste time asking you to bother with this. There’s my outer philosophy for you to deal with—the philosophy one has to invent when people like Ronnie—or yo
u—say that the individual isn’t automatically his own justification.”

  “Mind, I don’t say that,” she interrupted me.

  “No, but I dare say you sometimes think it. And when you do, this is what I answer.

  “It is a good thing for the world that people like me exist. Don’t be shocked. I know one doesn’t often hear people saying it, though I suspect they think it pretty often. It is a good thing for the world that people like me exist—even if we don’t consciously go about trying to make the world a better place. It’s a good thing that some people have the leisure to stand a little outside the struggle—developing a spirit of mellow and kindly scepticism with which to oppose cruel enthusiasms—developing standards of taste, which are, I believe, if not absolutely good, at any rate indications of an ideal. And we spread this kindly scepticism and these standards of taste—in dress and food and house decoration and art and manners—by just living our own lives and avoiding anything that savours of propaganda.”

  She laughed and said, “Tell that to someone with an empty stomach. I’m quoting Ronnie.”

  “I quite agree,” I answered. “If my stomach were empty, I shouldn’t think as I do. If I were in great bodily pain I shouldn’t think as I do. We want to fill empty stomachs—and I gather they are being filled—but it doesn’t follow that we must judge life only from that standpoint. After all, I may not have suffered from hunger, but I have from tooth-ache. At the time, I thought nothing else mattered but my tooth-ache, but when it was over I thought differently, and realised that my tooth-ache didn’t justify a social revolution.”

  “But social revolution isn’t a cure for tooth-ache.”

  “Nor is it, I’m afraid, for an empty stomach.”

  “Well, people differ over that.”

  “I know. And here’s a concession. Don’t tell Ronnie, but, up to a point, I’m prepared to give something away. I was going to say, before you broke in with your obvious comment, that if I believe anything, I believe that life must have a drawing-room if it’s to be civilised. We’ve built up the drawing-room by centuries of struggle, and to destroy it, just because it doesn’t hold everybody, is to my mind a reversion to savagery. I admit, we may have underrated the bathroom. (If you like, you can call the bathroom the needs of the community, and the drawing-room the needs of the individual—his sensual and æsthetic needs.) It may quite well turn out that the drawing-room has been too big and the bathroom too small. I dare say we can cut off part of the drawing-room and turn it into an extra bathroom and be all the better for it. But there’s no point in having a bath, if there’s no drawing-room to go into afterwards. A house without a drawing-room isn’t a gentleman’s house, and personally I don’t want to live in it.”

  As if she had been taking me literally, she looked slowly round the room in which we were sitting, and said, “The trouble is, Aunt Isabel, that most people haven’t got a drawing-room like yours.”

  “Good heavens!” I said, “it would be rather awful if our drawing-rooms were all alike. I haven’t got one like Lady Mawnan’s. (You remember, it was she who lent us her box at the opera to-night.) Happiness is relative after all. A great many people get as much thrill out of buying a new cheese-dish at the sixpenny bazaar as I do from buying a Rockingham china poodle, waving its little behind in the air. You’ll see a pair of them on the mantelpiece over there. I love their insolent attitudes, don’t you?”

  She looked round painstakingly, and said, “I can’t say they mean very much to me. But I think I’m following your argument. Happiness is relative—until you get to the empty stomach or tooth-ache level.”

  “Yes,” I repeated, “it’s relative. Only, there’s this snag. Once you’ve bought a Rockingham poodle, you can’t get any thrill from buying a sixpenny cheese-dish. The social revolution may not make anyone happy, but it’s certainly going to make me miserable. So I prefer not to risk it.”

  “Ronnie would say that you’re one of the few who should be sacrificed for the many.”

  “Why should you count by numbers in this way?”

  She said nothing, and I went on: “You see, I believe that the happiness of one person is just as important as the happiness of a million people. The judge of importance is in each case one individual, and you can’t multiply the individual, because—but I really am beginning to bore you now. Do you ever have this kind of conversation with Auntie Dora?”

  “Oh no.”

  “I know the question sounded absurd. What I meant was, do you ever ask her what you’ve been asking me? Or does Ronnie?”

  “Ronnie lets things slip out in front of her sometimes, but she doesn’t seem to hear or understand.”

  “He doesn’t bully her?”

  I was glad to see that my question seemed to suggest a new train of thought to her. I wanted news from Carlice, though I was far from realising what news I was to receive.

  “May I get another drink?” Joan asked me. “And can’t I get you one, too?”

  “Yes, do. Just a little gin with barley water and soda. And a ginger biscuit. Be careful of that syphon. It splutters. Shall I light the fire?”

  I didn’t want it myself, or I should have lit it before, but I suddenly thought Joan looked chilly. She was evidently going to tell me something, and I was anxious that she shouldn’t hurry off to bed through feeling cold. I was prepared to sit up all night, if necessary, however cold the room. There are advantages in preferring luxury to comfort—which Ronnie says is one of my characteristics.

  When Joan had settled herself again in her armchair, she said, “I wanted to talk to you about Auntie Dora to-night.”

  “Are you worried about her?”

  “No—well, yes, a little. She’s got so nervy.”

  “Do you think it’s sheer boredom?”

  “Why should she——”

  “Well, she isn’t like either of us. I shouldn’t be bored living there. But from her point of view—— We were worried about her, you know, after your father died. Thomas Hill thought she’d never stick it, though I think she felt it was her duty to bring up you and Ronnie. How far has she become fond of the place, do you think, in these ten years?”

  Again I found myself talking too much, in the hope of getting Joan to talk.

  “I don’t know if she’s really fond of it at all,” Joan said. “She likes her drawing-room”—we sniggered—“which she has had done up in that ghastly cretonne, or whatever it calls itself. But she’d really like something bijou and cosy and full of comfortable gadgets, not too far from the cinemas and the shops, with a pretty view of somebody else’s geraniums.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “Then I don’t see any reason for her to be upset at the thought of any changes which may occur in September, when Ronnie comes of age, and takes possession. Not, of course, that he would necessarily want to get rid of her then.”

  “But she is upset about next September.”

  “About possibly having to leave?”

  Joan laughed nervously. “It’s really too silly,” she said, “but I feel as if I were betraying Auntie Dora’s confidence in telling you. And it’s all rather painful, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” I answered. “Has Dora really told you a secret? How long ago was that?”

  “About a fortnight. She’d been very jumpy for a few days and I felt I ought to do something about it, just in case I could help. So I took special care to be sympathetic, and give her chances to open out to me, if that was what she needed. You know what I mean. Ronnie had gone back to Oxford, and we had the house to ourselves. In the end, it came out one night, when I was sitting with her in her drawing-room. She said quite suddenly, ‘Joan, there’s something I must tell you, but you’re not to tell anyone else!’”

  “Did you promise?” I asked.

  “No, I didn’t actually promise, thou
gh I dare say she thought I did. She was a long time nerving herself to tell me what the trouble was, and when she did tell me, it seemed so absurd, and yet, in a way, so nasty, that I didn’t know what to say, except, ‘I shouldn’t worry, if I were you,’ and that sort of useless stuff.”

  “What was it?”

  She took a gulp at her drink, and went on, “It seems that a few days after Daddy died, Auntie Dora was going through his things and found a kind of tin box—quite a small one——”

  “A cash-box, was it? About six inches long and, say, two or three deep?”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember his buying it for a shilling on his tenth birthday, to keep treasures in. Go on.”

  “It was done up with string and sealing-wax, and had a label on it in Daddy’s writing, saying, ‘For my son Ronald Carlice. To be given to him on his twenty-first birthday.’”

  “How very extraordinary! You say Auntie Dora found the box a few days after your father died. Where has it been since then? And why didn’t she tell someone about it? No doubt you asked her that.”

  “Yes, I did. She says she has kept it locked up in the bottom drawer of her bureau. She opened the drawer and showed me the box. She seemed almost afraid to touch it, as if it might explode or contained a snake. ‘If it’s been worrying you,’ I asked her, ‘why ever didn’t you show me it before? Or hand it over to the solicitors? Or let Aunt Isabel see it?’”

  “How did she react to that suggestion?”

  “Not very well, I’m afraid. She said that the box had obviously been put where she should find it, and that it was her responsibility to pass it on to Ronnie when he was twenty-one. I asked her if that was all that had been worrying her. Then she surprised me by saying, ‘Well, wouldn’t you think it enough to worry about, remembering everything?’ In a way, I couldn’t help agreeing.”