The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [47]
“I say, did you know you had these?” he asked.
“I did,” Bella lied.
“All first editions. They must be extremely valuable.”
“You put them back where you found them.”
Later, when he wrote to thank her for his visit—enclosing prints of some of his photographs—he mentioned the books again. This set Bella thinking. Why should that young puppy go poking round the house putting a price on everything? She wasn’t dead yet, Bella thought. And the more she thought of it, the more repugnant it became to think of Archie Banks carrying off her books to South Kensington and removing the chimneypieces and, as he threatened, writing an essay about the house for the Architectural Review. She had often heard that the books were valuable. Well, there were plenty of books in the library and she did not see why Archie Banks should profit by them. So she wrote a letter to a Dublin bookseller. He came to look through the library, and after a while he offered her twelve hundred pounds for the lot, or a thousand for the six books which had attracted Archie Banks’s attention. Bella was not sure that she had the right to sell things out of the house; a wholesale clearance would be noticed. So she kept the sermons and military history which made up most of the collection, the Dublin bookseller went off with the first editions, which eventually fetched rather less than he had given, and Bella was left with winter coming on and a thousand pounds in hand.
It was then that it occurred to her to give a party. There were always several parties given round Ballingar at Christmastime, but of late years Bella had not been invited to any, partly because many of her neighbours had never spoken to her, partly because they did not think she would want to come, and partly because they would not have known what to do with her if she had. As a matter of fact she loved parties. She liked sitting down to supper in a noisy room, she liked dance music and gossip about which of the girls was pretty and who was in love with them, and she liked drink and having things brought to her by men in pink evening coats. And though she tried to console herself with contemptuous reflections about the ancestry of the hostesses, it annoyed her very much whenever she heard of a party being given in the neighbourhood to which she was not asked.
And so it came about that, sitting with the Irish Times under the picture of Abraham Lincoln and gazing across the bare trees of the park to the hills beyond, Bella took it into her head to give a party. She rose immediately and hobbled across the room to the bellrope. Presently her butler came into the morning room; he wore the green baize apron in which he cleaned the silver and in his hand he carried the plate brush to emphasize the irregularity of the summons.
“Was it yourself ringing?” he asked.
“It was, who else?”
“And I at the silver!”
“Riley,” said Bella with some solemnity, “I propose to give a ball at Christmas.”
“Indeed!” said her butler. “And for what would you want to be dancing at your age?” But as Bella adumbrated her idea, a sympathetic light began to glitter in Riley’s eye.
“There’s not been such a ball in the country for twenty-five years. It will cost a fortune.”
“It will cost a thousand pounds,” said Bella proudly.
The preparations were necessarily stupendous. Seven new servants were recruited in the village and set to work dusting and cleaning and polishing, clearing out furniture and pulling up carpets. Their industry served only to reveal fresh requirements; plaster mouldings, long rotten, crumbled under the feather brooms, worm-eaten