Birthday Party

by C. H. B. Kitchin

  I knelt for a long time with the drawer wide open. The shot had sounded as if it came from the house, but I supposed it must have come from the garden—one of the men after a rabbit, perhaps. Just one shot, and then a very long silence. Then, suddenly, Isabel came in and shut the door behind her. She was very pale, and I knew that something must have happened. She said, “Dora, there’s been an accident. Ronnie has been killed.”

  She came over to me, walking like a man through the room, and caught me by the arm. “I know this is a great shock to you,” she said, “but you mustn’t let yourself give way yet. I want you to come with me into the morning-room. Your brother and Dr. Rusper are there.”

  “It wasn’t Stephen who shot him?”

  “Oh, no, no. I tell you it was an accident. Now will you please come? We have some very important things to settle quickly.”

  I had to go with her. When we were both through the morning-room door, she locked it and took the key.

  “That will keep unauthorised people out of the gunroom,” she said.

  (Unauthorised. What a funny word for her to have used.)

  “Why, was it in the gunroom?” I asked.

  “Yes, it was.”

  Don and Stephen were both sitting in armchairs when we came in. I felt they hadn’t said a single word to one another since the accident. They were both of them as white as could be. Don’s face seemed even whiter than his stiff white collar.

  Isabel sat down and told me to sit down too. Then Don got up, just a bit shakily, I thought, and said: “With your permission, Miss Carlice, I will now telephone to the police-station.”

  “When the time comes,” Isabel said in her most icy voice, “I will telephone to the police-station. This is my house now.” For one moment she looked as though she were startled at having said this. Stephen was so still, he might have been dead. I was frightened that he might come to life at any moment and do something awful.

  Then Don said, “We shall be asked why there was all this delay, Miss Carlice.”

  “We shall be asked a good many questions, Dr. Rusper,” she said, still in the same voice, “and you’ll have to answer them.”

  “I? My position, at least, is perfectly clear.”

  “I think not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well—you were the direct and also the indirect cause of my nephew’s death. If responsibility has to be taken for this accident, it will be taken entirely by you.”

  “It will not!”

  “I think it will.”

  “How dare you say that, Miss Carlice? I saw you push the gun towards your nephew’s face.”

  “I am prepared to swear in the witness-box that it was you. Your hands were flapping with terror. You were beside yourself with terror—and wounded dignity.”

  She laughed thinly, making little notes like somebody practising a flute.

  Don turned towards me and said, “Dora, I want you to bear witness that I wish to ring up the police at once. I don’t understand Miss Carlice’s attitude.”

  “Stephen,” I said, “are you quite all right, Stephen?”

  He frightened me, sitting there with glazed eyes and saying nothing. While I spoke, Isabel got up and mixed two glasses of whisky-and-soda. She gave one to Stephen and one to Don, who took it, to my surprise. I was surprised, too, at seeing the whisky decanter out on the round table—the “gallery-table” they had taught me to call it, because it has a little railing running round the top. Had Stephen being drinking before the “accident”? As I wondered this, he took a sip and smiled at me. I felt we were all in a kind of dream.

  Then Isabel sat down again and said, “Sit down, Dr. Rusper. I’ve a good deal to say yet. When I ring up the police, I shall give them to understand that the explanation of this tragedy rests entirely with you. I don’t think you’ll want to appear as having acted like an idiot—and an incompetent idiot at that—will you? I mean, you will be at some pains to safeguard your reputation, when you tell your story. And of course our reputations, which, though not quite so vulnerable as yours, are quite important. You see what I mean? You need a little time to think things over.”

  Again Don turned towards me.

  “You’ve heard Miss Carlice,” he said; “you’ll bear witness, won’t you, that I am asked to defeat the ends of justice and join a conspiracy to——”

  Isabel interrupted him.

  “One moment, Dr. Rusper. What story are you thinking of telling the police?”

  “What story? The truth. You had given a lethal weapon to a man who, to my personal knowledge, was utterly unfitted to handle it. When I was attempting to disarm him, you urged your nephew to interfere. He did interfere. There was a struggle for the gun, and at the critical moment you came to the gunroom door and gave the gun the fatal push which set the weapon off in your nephew’s face.”

  “That is untrue. Mr. Payne was shooting rabbits at my request, and you tried, tactlessly and without any authority in the world, to take the gun from him. Mr. Payne will bear out this statement. Unfortunately, through your obstinacy, there was a struggle for the weapon and I had to ask my nephew to intervene. He didn’t seem very successful and I came up myself—too late to prevent you from pointing the gun at my nephew and jostling Mr. Payne so that it went off. We shall never know, believe me, whose hand touched the trigger. . . .”

  Don, for the third and last time, looked at me, and then looked back as Isabel went on:

  “We should none of us come out of that very well—and you least well of all, I think, Dr. Rusper.”

  His reply was a kind of sniff, as if something very big and important were being sucked up those hairy nostrils of his.

  But Isabel was still talking. She seemed quite sure of herself now.

  “Before we say any more about all this, I want to read you two letters—here they are in my bag—written ten years ago in South Mersley. That is to say, in 1926, the year of the General Strike, and the year in which my brother Claude committed suicide in the gunroom here. So listen, my little suburban apothecary. Listen to this——”

  She opened her bag and pulled out two envelopes—greyish purple envelopes. I felt they were probably scented. She compared the dates on the postmarks and then took the notepaper out of one of the envelopes. “The heading is Elmcroft, Diana Road, South Mersley,” she said, “and the date is July 19th, 1926. The letters are both addressed to my brother.”

  And she began to read:

  Dear Sir,

  I had better explain at once that I am housekeeper to Dr. Payne, your wife’s father. You may not know, but I am very attached to the doctor, and now that he is so ill and cannot manage his affairs, it upsets me very much to think that things aren’t going on in his house as they should. I regret to have to tell you that there is trouble between your wife and Dr. Rusper, the master’s partner. I feel I owe it both to the master and to you, Sir, as his son-in-law, to let you know that things aren’t by any means what they ought to be. I trust I have spoken plainly enough and that you will be grateful to me for the warning I have given you. Should you desire further particulars both myself and Lily Jones, housemaid, will be able to supply the same.

  Yours faithfully,

  Eudoxia Greeg (Mrs.).

  As Isabel paused for a moment before taking out the second letter, I felt as if something extraordinary was happening to me. I didn’t know what. I looked at Don, but he didn’t look at me, and sat staring straight in front of him, as if he were diagnosing something in the panelling on the wall. I noticed in that moment how thin his hair was on the top of his head, and how his stomach stuck out when he let himself go. “It wasn’t with him,” I thought. “It wasn’t with him. It was somebody else who’s been dead all these ten years.”

  Then Isabel started to read the second letter:

>   “Elmcroft,”

  Diana Road,

  South Mersley.

  September 28th, 1926.

  Dear Sir,

  I confess I was very surprised at having no answer to my first letter. I almost feel you never got it, or doubted that it was bona fide, though it wasn’t as if it was an anonymous one. So let me tell you straight out here and now, that I’m not out to get anything for myself, and it isn’t a case of blackmail, as I told Dr. Rusper himself——

  “Dr. Rusper, did Mrs. Greeg speak to you on this matter?”

  “The cook-housekeeper at Elmcroft tried to blackmail me. I told her that if she had anything to say, she had better say it to my solicitor. That stopped her little game. She didn’t say anything more.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel, “she said this.” And she went on reading:

  Dr. Rusper seems to think he can take advantage of my poor master being so near to death, and then, I suppose, come into the practice as bold as brass and marry some poor young woman. But I don’t intend to let the honour of the family I serve be tarnished so easily as all that. No, Sir, and in case you don’t think the written word of Mrs. Greeg is good enough, I’m giving you the names of others who know what I know and will be prepared to swear to it in a court of law, if necessary. First, there’s Lily Jones, housemaid at this address. She doesn’t want to make trouble, but she’s a good girl at heart and knows the truth from a lie. Then there’s Tom Eynstop, who delivers milk for Messrs. Bradewell, dairymen, of 103, High Street, South Mersley. He was going across the common only yesterday afternoon and saw Mrs. Carlice and Dr. Rusper cuddling there. Cuddling—well he can tell you himself what he told Lily this morning. I prefer not to put his words in any letter of mine. But mind you, he’s a truthful young fellow even though he’s a bit of a lad. And then there’s Nurse Grader of St. Paul’s Hospital. She won’t speak straight out to me, but I know what she thinks. And she’s a good woman. And Mrs. Trempley too, who comes to oblige: 150a, London Road, North Mersley, is her address. As long ago as June, she was doing the hall, when she heard a noise in the drawing-room which made her think a thing or two. And shortly after, she said, out comes Dr. Rusper fingering his tie, and ten minutes later, Miss Dora, I mean Mrs. Carlice, looking red and sheepish. That’s what she swore to me——

  Isabel stopped suddenly, and said, “I don’t like reading this out. Besides, we haven’t much time.”

  “How did you get those letters?” Don growled.

  “They were in a tin cash-box, addressed to Ronnie when he should be twenty-one, in my brother’s handwriting. You see, my brother must have known. . . .”

  “Within three weeks of Dr. Payne’s funeral,” Don said, “this Mrs. Greeg was taken to an Inebriates’ Home. She died there a few weeks later of alcoholic softening of the brain.”

  Then Isabel looked at me quite suddenly and said:

  “Dora, I suppose all this is quite true, isn’t it?”

  “Quite true,” I said, and heard Isabel saying, “So you see, for the honour of my family, I ought to have the inquest on my brother’s death reopened.”

  She was adding something about the British Medical Council, when the ceiling seemed to come down with a rush on my face, and buried me, and I died.

  2

  I think I was lucky to have got out of it all like that. When I came to, I was in my own bed, with a watery sunset beating feebly on the window. At least, that was when I really came to. I seemed to remember dreaming that I had woken up before and been given something to drink and told to go to sleep again.

  As things began to come home to me, I wished I could have slept for a whole year. How much easier life would be if, when anything awful happened, you could simply fall asleep and wake up when it was all stale news and somebody else had done anything that had to be done at the time. So that you could say, “How about that murder?” and they would say to you, “Which murder? Oh, that one. We’ve nearly forgotten that now.”

  But I knew it was still the same day. It seemed impossible that days could ever be so long. I listened for sounds below, but this isn’t a house like Elmcroft. It’s full of sounds, but you don’t hear them distinctly from one room to another. The walls are so thick. In Elmcroft I could have heard anybody coming to the front door. No doubt Mrs. Greeg heard things too, that we didn’t reckon for. I tried, though my head wasn’t very clear, to remember what we had done that Mrs. Greeg and Lily could have found out. It was hard, because I had to think myself back into being quite a different person—somebody who gloried in what was happening and didn’t care and set no store by the future—a little fool, I suppose some would call me, carried away by her first real love affair. But it was worth it. Even though that fat, pompous, middle-aged man downstairs was the man I’d fallen in love with. He wasn’t the same person then, just as I wasn’t the same.

  The clock on my mantelpiece had stopped at twenty minutes past five. “It must have been exactly then,” I thought, “that Ronnie was killed in the gunroom.” Oh, my God! wasn’t it enough that Claude had chosen to kill himself there—after getting that second letter from Mrs. Greeg. How he must have been thinking over it, poor man. My father wasn’t even dead when she wrote it. A whole month and more. That was why Claude was like that at the funeral—like a churchyard ghost already. He didn’t seem angry with me, but very sad—sadder than I could be about anything. Oh, Claude—oh, darling Claude, I did love you in quite a different way—a better way—a way that lasts longer. . . .

  I looked at the clock again, because it frightened me to look at it. Twenty past five. Yes, it was just then that the gun went off. I heard the shot in the drawing-room when I was looking for those letters that she stole. Why didn’t I think of her as being the thief before? It seems so obvious now. But it had never occurred to me that Joan would talk to her. And I was in such a state that I could have believed anything—anything except the obvious. What shall I say to Isabel when she comes in to see me? For she’s bound to come in. I’ve something against her now. If I’m an—adulteress, she would say straight out at me—she’s a thief. A common thief. Looking in my private locked drawer. Is that the tradition of these old families? Give me South Mersley every time, if it is.

  When would she come? I couldn’t help looking at the clock on my mantelpiece. Twenty past five. Then suddenly I remembered that it had stopped this morning. It had stopped before I awoke, and I hadn’t thought of asking Flora to see to it. She ought to have seen to it without being asked. But she never was one of our brightest.

  For one moment I wondered whether Ronnie would keep her on, after I left. Then I remembered, and pictured him lying huddled up on the gunroom floor, like Claude, with a face one couldn’t look at. “You pushed the gun towards your nephew’s face,” Don said to Isabel. Oh, God, that couldn’t be true. I’ll not believe that. After all, she’s a living woman. We mustn’t think that about her. And even Don gave way. It was the first time, the very first time, that I’ve ever seen him fight a losing battle. I suppose he carried me here—and undressed me, perhaps. Oh, that’s too much. Isabel couldn’t have allowed him to do that. She and Flora must have done it. I won’t ask her.

  If this were Elmcroft, I could hear the police arriving. I suppose they have telephoned. Oh, why couldn’t I sleep longer?

  She comes. I knew she would come.

  “Come in.”

  She walks, almost on tip-toe, and sits down in the tub-chair.

  “Well, Dora, are you better? I do hope so.”

  Though she only says that, she is sweet—I can tell it at once—very sweet, like something you saw when you were a child behind the plate-glass of an expensive confectioner, and couldn’t afford to buy—and have never bought.

  “Dora, you must forgive me about those letters.”

  I turned over on my side and said, “Oh, I thought I should have to ask you that, a
nd you’ve known since June. Was it June?”

  “Yes, Joan told me about your secret. She was worried on Ronnie’s account. I thought I had better know what the truth really was. I ought to have told you—that’s where I went wrong. I thought, when you missed the box, you’d think Joan had taken it. And that would have meant no harm, because you had confidence in her, as we all had. I should have said and done nothing—as you know—but with Dr. Rusper there I had to use the letters. You understand this, don’t you?”

  “You mean, for Stephen’s sake?”

  “For his sake and mine and, in a way, Dr. Rusper’s sake, too. We were all in it——”

  “Like a lynching,” I thought suddenly. But I didn’t say that.

  “And Ronnie?” I asked. “What’s happened to him now?”

  “That’s all right, Dora. You mustn’t think of that. The police have been here and Dr. Rusper has seen them. He says Ronnie took the gun and turned it on himself. He’ll tell you to-morrow what he said to them.”

  “He’s staying here, then?”

  “Yes, for to-night.”

  “Isabel, I don’t want to see him to-morrow. I can’t see him. You know why.”

  She went to the window and pulled the curtains together. It was now quite dark, and she switched on a little lamp by the dressing-table. It made funny shadows. It was the first time I had ever seen that lamp on without the others. When she spoke, she was almost soapy.

  “My dear child, do believe this. I think no worse of you for anything that may have happened ten years ago. Good heavens, it was none of my business. You did no harm.”