Birthday Party

by C. H. B. Kitchin

  Dora saw me bravely to the last barrier at Waterloo. I kept saying, “Surely it would be better if you left me now,” but she wouldn’t go. As she walked up the platform she dabbed her eyes —not, I think, because it was I who was going, but because all leave-taking in those days was sad. And, in a generic way, treading daintily, dancing almost, through the packs and haversacks left on the platform, while their owners were crowding to the buffet and singing idiotic songs, she was seeing off a soldier-brother.

  That was about midday, twenty-one years ago. The sun, which shines now, shone through the railway-carriage window as we went to Southampton. The carriage smelt of sweat, but there are worse smells than that. Then comes the channel crossing—that’ll be twenty-one years ago to-night—when I slept on the floor under a table in the smoking-room. But my superstition won’t let me look ahead. Twenty-one years and I’ve finished with it all. But anything that isn’t twenty-one years old is still a danger.

  When the next war comes, I have a feeling I shall be fit enough to go, in spite of Rusper. If one’s fit enough to enjoy oneself, as I most certainly am, one would surely be fit enough to do something unpleasant. Too old perhaps? Well, that depends on what breathing-space we have. These newspaper posters don’t give one much hope.

  But I am spoiling my morning—my meditation after church. “O Lord, give us peace in our time.” Is that prayer taboo, as being too much a request for a personal benefit? I should like to talk to that parson—for one evening only, and on my own terms, so that there could be no chance of his trying to “reclaim” me. Reclaim me from what? From trifling, from sucking the very essence out of life, from penetrating its most full intention, if it has one, or giving it an intention, if it hasn’t one? No, it isn’t I who should be reclaimed.

  Meanwhile there is lunch, for which they don’t like you to be late at the King Stephen. I must face the hill and bear with my detestable shoes. Perhaps I shall overtake the sailor and the nursemaid. She too should be hurrying home to lunch by now. I have never fallen in love with a nursemaid yet. As well perhaps; for if I did, Rusper would come here for a medical conference and seduce her. No, he’d be too careful for that. Rusper never seduces. (I like the sound of that.) He simply picks the woman you want to marry and marries her himself. And she has two children.

  3

  If I had been more like Dora I should have made a successful marriage. But I’m unlike her in every way, except that she’s quite a nice person and I suppose I’m really quite nice too. We ought to have something in common, although we had different mothers. But I can see little trace of my father in myself. I must take entirely after that mysterious mother of mine, that girl of good family (as it was hinted to me), who quarrelled with it and went on the stage and became a pantomime fairy. “Your mother was an unsuccessful actress,” my father once said to me, “but I need hardly say she did not come from that stratum of society.” All South Mersley—such as it was thirty years ago—was speaking in the words “that stratum.” “What was her maiden name?” I asked him once, and he didn’t tell me. I suppose I could have found out, but I didn’t. After all, she only lived three days after I was born.

  It makes me rather a romantic figure, this—not merely the son of a clever little suburban doctor. Sometimes I wonder if I am his son at all. It is possible, I suppose, that I’m not—with the stage-door ever open. But he couldn’t have known. He’d have turned her out, and me too. Even if his vanity might have prevented him from suspecting, however obvious it was, someone would have told him. And I have his utterly undistinguished hair. No, I must rule out that myth, though it’s a pleasant fancy. Observe, that I give him no credit for having been passionately in love with my mother. And yet he must have been, or he’d never have married a girl who quarrelled with her family. Or did he think the family would reconcile itself to her and become his patients? “My father-in-law the baronet whom I am treating for gout.” I remember his unctuous manner when baronets called. “Dora girl, just make sure that the hall and vestibule are thoroughly tidy.” And Dora girl did. Rusper, I suppose, gives the same order, and Catherine girl has to see to the tidying.

  Time. I must go.

  4

  It’s easy for me to relive the war again, and pass its twenty-one-year-old landmarks one by one. But after the war I find it much harder to recapture myself. A dreary and long convalescence, then six years in Daly’s office, which have left me with nothing but little muddled memories of law. And they are fading, and the law has all been altered, so that I couldn’t go back there. Then my breakaway at the chance of going to Japan. Stephen Payne, private tutor, bear-leader with such a distinguished young charge. The pay was good, and the journey long and interesting. Ten years ago. And while I was away news of my father’s illness. Ought I to have hurried back? He seldom if ever enjoyed seeing me. His death, while I was ill with fever at Marseilles, among the benign French nuns. Then my enfeebled return to find Rusper my trustee and my excellent income dependent upon his whim.

  And still, I thought, I must get a job again. Barling House School. An academy for young gentlemen, where I taught classics and English literature with a mechanical competence which surprised me. A misty morbid period of misery without reason. I feared the future (not as I fear it now, because it may destroy the present), but because the present held nothing. I wanted to die, painlessly and romantically. A few months among the pine trees of Switzerland and then a tranquil ending. There was a boy called Napier who was supposed to have a tendency to consumption. I used to lean over him as I corrected his work, hoping to catch his breath and his disease. The feeblest attempt at suicide ever made. In course of time, Napier did go to a sanatorium and did die—and I didn’t.

  But that was some months after I had met Catherine Bain. I remember, the first day, before I had drifted into being in love with her, I thought we could never marry. Our names were too much alike. “Mr. Payne marries Miss Bain.” The announcement would have sounded too absurd. But fancy my thinking of marrying her that first day—a tea-party given by the headmaster’s wife. We had tea in the private garden by the big medlar tree. There was a strong smell of new-mown hay from the field beyond the iron fence. Her parents were there, nice people, and newcomers to the South Mersley district. They had enough, I gathered, but not much to live on. Catherine kept house for them. She had been to London University and was still disappointed at not having got an intellectual job. She was twenty-seven—ten years younger than I. Was the difference in age too big? That evening, when Howard, the games-master, said that she was attractive without being pretty, I blushed and went out of the room.

  Two Sundays later, her mother asked me to tea. To reach their house one had to pass Elmcroft, which Dora and Rusper had sold to a prosperous sanitary engineer. Three noisy children were playing with a ball on the little front lawn, and the honeysuckle, which has a long flowering season, was still sprawling on the fence by the white gate. As I passed it, I thought, “That was my old life. Perhaps I am walking to a new one.”

  But here is the King Stephen Hotel, with the dinner-bell calling me in.

  5

  Mrs. Temperley has asked me to join her and Mrs. Adams on a motor-ride to visit some friends in the hinterland of the county. The friends, who must be rich, have sent their car. “Mr. Payne, you don’t want to talk to two stout old ladies all the afternoon. Wouldn’t you like to sit in front?” So I do. A fine car, but not broad enough in the beam. The driver is taciturn, which is a good thing. I must keep my nervous force for new contacts at tea-time. I wonder what they will think of my old shoes. The only thing that matters is not to do Mrs. Temperley any discredit, especially as la belle Adams is a bit of a snob.

  All through lunch—or dinner, as one should call it on Sundays at the King Stephen—I have been thinking of Catherine in my second layer of thoughts, and walking my walk past Elmcroft to the Bains’ new house, on the fringe of what is now th
e Garden City. It was neat, tidy and bare. There were intellectual books in the drawing-room. I felt suddenly intellectual myself, and exalted to a higher spiritual plane. Why had I let my gifts grow rusty? At school, I had always been “very promising.” Where now was my performance? Was I destined, at last, to have a flowering season? (To think that all this is only five years ago.) Catherine talked to me, when she could, as if she were starved for someone like me to talk to. A conversation without back-chat. There was about her no touch of the bright young thing, as there was about her elder and married sister. Mrs. Bain listened, and joined in sometimes with just the right word—or so it seemed to me then. I gathered that Mrs. Bain had a brother who was a very brilliant doctor in London. This was an ingredient in my undoing, though I didn’t know it then. That evening I prepared a letter asking Catherine if we could meet again. I allowed four days to elapse before posting it. She wrote back at once saying that she would be very glad to see me. And the whole thing began.

  It was too deliberate, too ethereal on my side. I see it now. I was a poor lover. I had such high notions, and was too eager to make myself mentally fit, and do something worthy of her. I should have done better to develop my muscles and grow a strong moustache. That was what she wanted, though I give her full credit for not knowing it at the time. The first months were the happiest, when we met on the intellectual plane, tacitly resolving to leave the physical alone, until our souls had merged. In those ecstatic periods I wrote my novel. I read her passages from it and she flattered me about them. Our mathematics master, whom I always liked, had a brother-in-law who was a publisher. It may have been his influence which got the book accepted. I still think it was a good book, but it required a reader with patience and a certain attitude of mind which is not usual.

  I had now known Catherine nearly two years. I was thirty-nine. She was twenty-nine, and it was high time we married. Yet when I asked her, she, who at first had been disappointed—so I imagined—at my backwardness, gave me a half refusal. I was dazed, but not shattered. We were meeting once or twice a week, went to concerts, exhibitions of pictures, lectures and high-brow plays together. Sometimes we even danced. As I now see it, there was too little dancing in the programme for her taste—which had changed somewhat from the taste she had when we first knew one another. Perhaps, I thought, she is ambitious for me. She wants a husband who will make his mark. My book must be a success. The inspiration was Catherine’s and, as such, couldn’t fail me. Desperately I polished up my proofs, making so many corrections, interpolations and excisions that my publishers complained. And almost the very day—yes, it was the very day—when I had sent back the last proof with its final revision, and had met Catherine and told her that the great work was completed for better or for worse—she said, with that careful indifference which is so ominous in a love-affair, “I met a great friend of yours last night, a Doctor Rusper.”

  My feelings for Rusper were not then what they are now. So far he had never thrown his weight about in my direction. I was only too glad to leave the business side of the trust to him and Dora, who seemed to have the knack of getting on well with him, and he for his part paid out my allowance without cavil. I didn’t like him. In the early days he had been too fond of giving me semi-medical advice, often accompanied by jocular innuendo. “You look a bit washed out, young fellow. Can’t go on burning the candle at both ends for ever, you know.” And so on, like a mild school-bully. He had done quite well since taking over my father’s practice, and was already one of the leading doctors in South Mersley. I was content to let him well alone, and avoided the houses to which he went. I couldn’t understand how anybody could find pleasure in his society. Yet people did—and Catherine among them. “Why haven’t you let us meet before?” she asked me. I answered that I had never wished to bore her. “But he isn’t boring,” she said. I asked her what he had said that was so remarkable—a foolish question. How slowly my wits were working! She laughed and said that he hadn’t said anything remarkable. None the less, she hadn’t found him a bore. “There are evenings when even you say nothing remarkable,” she told me. “And I never find you boring.” I probed further. Where had she met him, and how did she find out that he was connected with my family? She answered without reservation, and asked me why I was so interested in the meeting. “Because you seem to have been interested in it,” I said. “Oh, well,” she replied, “we’ve rather exhausted the interest of it now, haven’t we?” Then, for the hundredth time, we talked about my book.

  The next Sunday but one I went to tea at Mrs. Bain’s and found Rusper there. “Mother asked him,” Catherine whispered to me. “I think she’s hoping he can cure Daddy’s sciatica.” It was the first afternoon I really loathed him. He seemed to make himself at home much too quickly—almost to hold the floor. He was at his best—talking well for him—and I was at my worst. He flattered Mrs. Bain about her brother the eminent London doctor, played up to the brightness of Catherine’s married sister, and a couple of bright young things who had come with her to the house, and to Catherine herself he was quietly deferential. When he spoke to me, it was in a hearty manner which made me tongue-tied. Once or twice I caught Catherine watching him out of the corner of her eye. I went away full of woe.

  The next four months have almost as bleak a record as the war. A bleaker record, in a way, though now, in my changed mood, I see that they didn’t leave such a scar behind them. Catherine was in love with Rusper. I made appalling scenes which I had no right to make. I even thought she was his mistress. But Rusper never seduces. He decided to marry her—to marry into the family of the famous London doctor—and I might have known it would happen. To do Catherine justice, she wanted to be perfectly frank with me, as soon as she knew her own mind. It was I, really, who wouldn’t let her be frank and tried to postpone a crisis. At all costs, I thought, I must keep her from committing herself till my book comes out. Somehow I thought of my book as a last desperate defence of our relationship. If it were a real success, surely it would bind us indissolubly together. I must have been more stupid then than I am now.

  The book came out. Reviews were slow to appear and not very numerous. On the whole, they were unfavourable. The kindest remark was, “Mr. Payne has just failed to create a prose-poem,” and the unkindest, “Mr. Payne’s cult of the ego would be nauseating if it were skilfully portrayed. As it is, we can dismiss it as a piece of irrelevant tediousness.” I was aghast at the injustice. This was the reward of all those hours of mental conflict, this the fruit of all that mingled ecstasy and despair, this the attention given to a sincere and sensitive view of life. I felt it all as keenly as if I had been nineteen and had published a volume of undergraduate poetry. Perhaps my development was arrested, and I was going through a phase which normal people do go through at nineteen.

  Catherine was very kind. I really believe she delayed her formal engagement to Rusper for a few weeks on my behalf. She wrote me a long letter, and told me that, much as she liked the book herself, she had feared it would never have a popular appeal. To get good notices for a first novel one must belong to a literary coterie, or else one must be very young and startling. I wrote back with bitter agreement. “Yes,” I said, “I suppose it is inevitable that a middle-aged schoolmaster who suddenly writes a novel should be as much a failure at that as at everything else. If I had been a murderer, everyone would have been eager to know what I had to say. But as I happen to have a fairly cultivated mind, and have tried to enlarge the scope of human sensitiveness and to create a thing of beauty, instead of exposing a scandal or howling at some supposed abuse, I am unreadable.” I wrote a great deal more in this vein, which Catherine must have found tedious. It was a relief to write, and I took pains with the letter. I suppose that is why some of its phrases still remain in my memory.

  She wrote back. We met. A dreary lamentable meeting. The games-master introduced me to whisky, and I developed a new accomplishment.

  The fact t
hat there was no crisis in my life when Catherine became engaged to Rusper, and no crisis even when she married him, amazed me. There was I, a failure in love, a failure in literature, still teaching at Barling House School, and likely to teach there for ever. One half of me looked at the other half with astonishment. I really think my personality did split in two at that time. I used to have staccato dialogues with myself. It seemed a pleasure—or if not that, a relief—to do things with one side of my character which should bewilder the other side. “Now, Stephen,” I would say, “in ten minutes you’ve got to go into classroom number three and teach fifteen little boys The Ancient Mariner. Are you going to do it? I can’t believe you’re going to do it. Aren’t you too bored?” And the other half would answer, “I’m going to do it, and I want to be bored. I hope I’m very bored indeed, and I hope you are bored stiff too.” I began to enjoy watching myself as an automaton, and almost encouraged the rift between my two selves. Without knowing it, I was preparing for the salvation which I have now gained. But a crisis had to come first—a delayed crisis, quite a long time after Catherine’s marriage, when she was already nursing her first baby.

  It was six o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in November, and I was taking the usual lesson—not The Ancient Mariner this time, but Tennyson’s Dream of Fair Women. The poem was an old favourite of mine, and many memories of my own schooldays were bound up with it—the sound of someone practising on the chapel organ, the heavy and dirty carving round the classroom door, and the smell of our evening meal cooking below stairs. I had already told myself that not one of my pupils would appreciate the work—that their libidos would be fluttering round motor-bicycles and wireless-sets, however inspired my interpretation of the poem’s beauties. And the right-minded half of me had already said to the wrong-minded half, “Why don’t you do something about it? Stage a demonstration. Don’t take their indifference lying down.” In vain my wrong-minded half had urged that if my pupils were indifferent, the fault was mine—that I should teach better. I was in a mood to be exasperated—perhaps a little stimulant had helped—and I soon had cause. The boy was called Tipples—a not inappropriate name. He was sitting where Napier—the consumptive who had failed to kill me—used to sit before he went away, and perhaps a burst of fatuity coming from that rather romantic corner of the room had a specially potent effect on me. At all events, when it came, I stood up on my little dais, and said, “You foolish boy!” There was a titter at this—an expected titter which nerved me to do my stuff in grand style. “This is the fifth time, Tipples,” I went on, “that you’ve been inattentive. This is the fifth time that you’ve been impertinent in your answer. Do you suppose there’s any pleasure in teaching a bloody little brat like you?” I paused, and the boy—I give him marks for that—said, “No, sir!” Then I took up the huge stone ink-bottle on my desk—it was full of ink—walked slowly to where Tipples was sitting, emptied it over his head and suddenly threw it at the window. There was a crash of broken glass behind the blind. I went up to my dais again, in a horrified silence, and after looking at the wretched boy, with ink dripping down his nose into his open mouth, I said, still very quietly, “You will spend the remainder of this lesson just as you are. I hope the ink tastes good.” Then I fainted. I don’t see quite what else I could have done.