Читать книгу The Kingdom of Theophilus - William J. Locke - Страница 3

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THEOPHILUS BIRD, having walked the half-mile or so from Blackheath Station, opened the gate of his dark villa, crossed the bit of garden faintly lit by the fanlight over the front door, and with his latch-key let himself into the house. Hat and coat hung up on a walnut hatstand, he rubbed his hands together, for it was a frosty January evening, and though, according to convention, he had put on his gloves in order to walk from his office in Whitehall to Charing Cross Station, he had taken them off in the railway carriage and forgotten to put them on again.

The plan of the entrance floor was simple. On the immediate left of the hall, a small room—grandiloquently termed the library—and, farther along, the dining-room. On the right, one flight of stairs going up, and another going down, with a toilet-room between. In front, the drawing-room. The door of this he opened, to find pitch blackness. An electric light switched on showed the ashes of a dead fire. The dining-room proved equally cheerless. He rang the bell. A meagre woman in a soiled print dress appeared.

“Oh, cook,” said he in a deprecatory tone, “the fires seem to have gone out.”

“Dear, dear,” said the woman, “I told Florence to be sure to look after them before she left. It’s her evening out, sir. These girls are so careless nowadays.”

“But what’s to be done?” asked Theophilus.

“I’ll light the gas-fire in the library,” said the cook.

He followed her meekly into the dismal little room, and thanked her for the extra toil which she endured in applying a match to the asbestos lumps in the grate.

“Oh, and your mistress——?” said he, as she was at the door.

“Madam’s at Greenwich, sir.”

“Yes, yes,” said Theophilus, “I forgot. A Committee Meeting. She said something about it this morning.”

He accepted the deadly cold of the house more like an unreasoning domestic animal than a human master returning to expected comfort after a hard day’s work. The gas-fire, before which, seated on the edge of an old leather arm-chair, he warmed himself, satisfied physical needs. In its mechanically genial glow, his soul expanded. He rose at last, with the air of a contented man, and, picking up from an untidy small table on the other side of the room a heavy-looking green-covered review, like one seriously and soberly on inexorable duty bent, began to read a statistical article on Poor-Law Legislation in Poland. His feet growing scorched before the fiercely red asbestos, he moved them away and impelled himself backwards. No longer suffering from frozen extremities, he had apparently nothing more to ask of life.

He sprawled comfortably in his chair of broken springs, of which a particular one, projecting sharply, would have caused exquisite annoyance to any other male human being. To catch the light on his page from the central chandelier, he had to twist his neck awry. But it had never occurred to Theophilus to get a reading-lamp, or otherwise contrive the amenities of studious leisure. Nor, as the time went on and his article finished and digested, he began another on the Rhythmics of Magyar Folk Songs, did he reflect with any displeasure that Evelina, his wife, was unconscionably late, and that the half-past seven dinner-hour had merged itself long ago into the abyss of eternity.

He took her deflection as a matter of course. A member of the Greenwich Borough Council, she had Civic Duties commanding his respect. His commiseration for her fatigue in the exercise of these high functions far exceeded any petty grievance which might have been inspired by her neglect of household affairs.

Once, Daphne Wavering said to him:

“How you can stick it, I don’t know!”

Daphne Wavering was very young—the daughter of Luke Wavering, the brilliant financier, who was Mrs. Bird’s first cousin.

“If I were a man,” she had continued, “and had a wife like Evelina, I’d bash her over the head with a club and lock her up in the kitchen until she had learned to serve up a ten-course dinner.”

The criticism had aroused his resentment. At that time, two or three years before, Daphne was seventeen—a mocking thing, all shamelessly exposed legs and arms and neck, all impudence and bad manners, all unhealthy froth, the cynical incarnation of everything that was material, gross, sensual, ignorant, the negation of whatsoever there was of the intellectual, the earnest, the marble reality in human existence. For once in his unemotional life he had rasped out words of cold anger, and she had not spoken to him for a year.

Theophilus Bird admired his wife. She was a personality. She did Things. He liked people who did Things as long as they weren’t futile Things like those perpetrated for petty gain by modern painters, poets and actors. That was why he held in high esteem his wife’s cousin, Luke Wavering. He made mines to yawn where no mine had ever yawned before. He contributed to the Welfare of the Race. Theophilus held his wife’s strong views on the Welfare of the Race. He steeped himself in Tolstoi and Dostoievsky and Nietzsche and hoc genus omne of merry apostles. His marriage with Evelina, according to Daphne Wavering, was made on the Highest Brows of Heaven....

He lounged ungainly in the shabbily-furnished room, intent on queer facts that mattered not to any quick son of man. Yet his semblance to his kind was by no means unprepossessing. He was long and big-boned, and the hands that held the review were long-fingered and sensitive. His features were pleasant and a finely-cut falcon nose gave them distinction. His complexion was dark sanguine. He wore a scrubby, ill-cared-for black moustache, which seemed to be a stray wisp of his untidy dark hair. His age was thirty-seven, and he was a Principal Clerk in the Home Office. On the whole, a man of some distinction; a Scholar of a small Cambridge college; a brilliant First in the Economies Tripos; and he had come out near the head of the list in his Civil Service Examination. He became inevitably the successful official. He could conceive no avocation more congenial than that afforded by his Department, which dealt with one of the manifold branches of Human Welfare. His work absorbed his emotional activities. It formed the beginning and end of his existence. The middle was distributed between such studies as should further qualify him for his high office, and a mild interest in Evelina, who, in her own sphere, was devoting herself, like him, to the furtherance of Human Welfare.... For relaxation they would go from Blackheath to Hampstead on Sunday evenings to see exotic plays which, to the cognoscenti, marked some stage in the progress of mankind, but made the average citizen sit on his tail and howl like a dog. Theophilus read “The Times” every morning on the railway journey from Blackheath to Charing Cross, and was rather disliked by the man sitting next to him, who, generally reading the less voluminous “Daily Sketch,” objected to the wind being, so to speak, taken out of his sails. Theophilus admired “The Times” for the self-denying ordinance that banned flippancy from its columns.... He dressed in a subfusc yet careful austerity, wearing a clean shirt every morning so as to maintain the dignity of one who was responsible for certain of the wheels on which depended the working of the machinery of Human Welfare. If the Home Office did not devote itself to the Human Welfare of England it was naught. He was contented to place high gifts of scholarship, altruism and integrity at the service of the Empire for a remuneration of eight hundred pounds a year.

There was the rattle of a taxi outside, a sharp woman’s voice, the click of a latch-key, a slamming door, and his wife entered the room. He closed the review and rose to his feet. He was essentially a man of dry courtesies.

“I hope you’re not very tired, my dear?”

“If you want to study human unreason, join the Finance Committee of a Borough Council. I’m nearly dead.”

She looked it, especially when she clawed off a close-fitting hat and cast it on the table and disclosed an untidy shock of cropped black hair that hung in damp wisps about her forehead. Evelina’s hair was always an offence to Daphne Wavering, who asserted that Theophilus bit it off in absent-minded moments of tenderness. She was an agreeably built woman, with delicate features and almost beautifully set dark eyes, rendered startling by general haggardness, and discounted by negligence of the simple arts whereby a woman modifies a sallow complexion.

“In spite of the sense that John Roberts—that’s our Chairman, you know—and myself tried to put into them, they’ve passed that idiotic Tramway Extension. They call themselves Socialists, the Apostles of Progress, and they can’t see that tram-lines are as dead as sailing ships, and the only solution of transport is free-moving traffic. I’m sick to death of them.” She put off her coat. “You’re suffocatingly hot in here.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Theophilus, moving with his foot the lever which controlled the gas-fire; “but when I came in there was no other fire in the house.”

The gaunt cook appeared on the threshold.

“Shall I serve the dinner, ma’am?”

Evelina passed a hand across a weary brow.

“Dinner? Oh, yes, of course.” She glanced at a clock on the mantelpiece, occupying, under the gable of a Swiss chalet, the superficies of its ground floor. “I’m afraid I’m late, Theophilus; but those fools ... Do you mind if we don’t change?”

Theophilus didn’t mind. Usually they changed for dinner. It was part of the ritual of respectability. Theophilus put on an old dinner-jacket suit, and Evelina threw on some semblance of an evening gown. Their neighbours on each side of them, and in nearly all the little detached comfortless villas over the way, were frankly lower middle-class. Their daughters “walked out” and “kept company,” and they had kippers and periwinkles and shrimps and other relishes to their tea, and supped at nine on cold scraps of meat and cheese and beer. But the Birds, for all their austerity of temperament and narrowness of means, were gentlefolk by tradition, and could not rid themselves of the conventional amenities of life. They knew no one in their depressing little Byfield Road, and by every one in Byfield Road they were respected and envied and cordially disliked.

Ten minutes later they met in the arctic dining-room.

“What about a bit of fire?” asked Theophilus.

“By the time it’s set going we’ll have finished dinner,” said Evelina; but she conceded so far to human frailty as to command the cook to light the fire in the drawing-room, even though she would demean herself to the functions of Florence, the house-parlourmaid, now presumably a-thrill in a Picture Palace, with a beefy young man’s arm around her waist.

“I can’t do everything at once, ma’am,” said the cook, in polite defensive. “If the dinner’s spoilt it ain’t my fault—to say nothing of its being three-quarters of an hour late.”

Recognizing that the woman was just in her apologia, they ate the clammy and ill-served meal without conscious consideration of its beastliness. They belonged—God knows why, but at any rate for a subscription of five shillings a year—to the Anglo-Lettonian Society, and, that morning, Evelina had received a pamphlet on Prostitution in Lapland. An amazing illumination on the question of the Social Evil. Theophilus must read it. Theophilus professed the eagerness of the man starving for sociological fact. Withered slips of plaice polluted by a scum-covered viscous something compounded of flour and anchovy sauce out of a bottle; wizened bits of a once shoulder of old mutton floating about in thin, greasy, liquid, hard-boiled potatoes and a few chunks of flotsam carrot; a cabinet pudding that might have been made by an undertaker; a dish of plague-spotted bananas, and another of figs of ancient vintage; coffee made from Superb Mocha Paste; and for Theophilus the one cigar per diem, drawn from a store always renewed by an indulgent wife as a gift on the three great anniversaries of the year—Christmas, his birthday, and their wedding day—from some secret emporium of which she, sola mortalium, held the awful secret: such was the dinner of the Theophilus Birds, who went through with it, happily unconscious of its vileness. They had drunk a wine-glass each of decanted Australian Burgundy. They were anti-prohibitionists, and had been trained in the idea that wine was a necessary accompaniment to a gentleman’s dinner. Neither of them liked it very much. For lunch at his club Theophilus drank ginger-ale.

“Any news?” asked Evelina.

“Nothing pleasant. We hear that the vacant Assistant Secretaryship is to be filled up from the outside. Octavius Fenton’s mentioned ...”

“That’s damnable,” said Evelina. “It blocks all promotion. And Fenton—that’s the man——”

“Yes, you know ... rotten little solicitor taken up by Granbury towards the end of the War, and pitchforked into job after job—and now about to be pitchforked over the head of us all.”

He spoke with the bitterness of the justifiably aggrieved official. Yet he immediately sought to make his complaint impersonal.

“It’s the principle of the proceeding I object to. All our university careers, all our years of training and devotion to our work, go for nothing. I doubt whether this fellow Fenton could translate a line of Horace, or solve a quadratic equation. It’s all corruption, intrigue and underhand dealing.... Luckily I’m interested in my work for its own sake. I’m doing something, which is all that matters. Otherwise——”

He made a vague gesture that might have signified his consignment to deserved perdition of the Service on which the British Empire depended.

“Also, thank goodness,” said Evelina, “we have our intellectual interests apart from these sordid worries.”

“Quite so,” said Theophilus, “but, anyhow, there’s such a thing as Abstract Justice for which we ought to fight.”

The telephone bell shrilled in the little hall outside. Theophilus rose to attend to the summons, and presently returned to Evelina, who was finishing her cup of Mocha Paste coffee.

“It was Luke wanting to know whether we’d be in to-night. He’ll be round in a few minutes.”

Evelina frowned and brushed straggling hair from her forehead.

“What on earth does he want?”

“Says he can’t tell me over the telephone.”

“He’s not bringing that awful child with him?”

“Daphne? ... Yes, I suppose so. I think he said ‘we.’ ”

“I can just stand Luke—but Daphne——”

“Why don’t you go to bed, my dear? You look dog-tired. I’ll make your excuses.”

Evelina rose and threw her yesterday’s napkin impatiently on the table. Theophilus often irritated her by delicate hints at feminine weakness. The insinuation that she should fear encounter with Daphne aroused her polite anger.

“If Luke has anything important to say to you, it’s essential that I should hear it.”

Vaguely conscious, as he was now and then, of his wife’s sex, and of some mental twist inherent therein, he said: “All right, my dear,” and opened the door for her to pass out. They entered the drawing-room, where a sulky fire was fuming in the grate. Theophilus thrust the poker between the bars to create a draught, and Evelina went upstairs to fetch a knitted woolly shawl. The room was furnished anyhow. It had a carpet, curtains, chairs and a sofa. A set of huge Piranesi prints of Roman temples and arches (a wedding present from a university friend) threw the little room out of scale; as did also a massive carved Venetian walnut table (a wedding present too—from Evelina’s aunt, Miss Fanny Wavering) on which stood a melancholy aspidistra in a naked flower-pot.

When Evelina returned to the drawing-room, wrapped in a salmon-pink woolly shawl, tiny tongues of flame were beginning to rise through the hitherto uninterested coal.

“I wish Luke would have a little more consideration,” she said petulantly. “He knows we’re busy people. I was counting on this evening for reading over the Report of the Health Committee, which comes up at the next Council Meeting.”

“If he hadn’t made such a point of it——” Theophilus began.

She interrupted. “I don’t blame you in the least, my dear. What could you say?”

She had always been impatient of her cousin, Luke Wavering, who stood for all the ideals that her temperament and self-training had led her to despise. He was a successful seeker after wealth and pleasure, and owned race-horses and—according to malignant rumour—mistresses; he squandered money on the tables of Monte Carlo and Deauville, and had a great big house close by, in Denmark Hill, with liveried footmen and French chefs and motor-cars and expensive dogs, and cared no more for Human Welfare than for the Moral Training of Warthogs. He had never read a line of Sydney Webb or Tchekov in his life. Once escaped from the City, where he made mere money, he was but an empty thing bounded by a horizon of all the Vanities. If Evelina had no use for Luke Wavering, still less had she for his daughter, Daphne, brought up by him in this atmosphere of Babylonic miasma. Save now and then for week-ends, in rich old Aunt Fanny’s stately mausoleum of a house in Hertfordshire, they rarely met; for which Evelina was grateful to a benign Providence.

“I wonder what on earth he wants to see you about at this time of night,” said Evelina, who at least had the human attribute of curiosity.

“He said something about a good thing—an opportunity that occurs once in a hundred years. After all,” Theophilus continued, regarding the stump of his cigar which had only an eighth of an inch to go before it warranted happy rejection, “we could do with a little more money, couldn’t we?”

“I suppose we could,” said Evelina. “But I don’t quite see what we could do with it. We’re comfortable as we are. What more do you want, Theophilus?”

A few moments’ reflection produced the shadow of a smile.

“I don’t quite know. I should like to get a few more books—and a fur-lined coat would be comfortable on these cold nights.”

“If you’d only wear the woolly waistcoat I gave you, you’d be just as warm as with a fur coat. But you won’t.”

“I sometimes do,” said Theophilus apologetically. “But this morning I forgot it. Perhaps if we had a little more money we might employ somebody to remind me of such things.”

She uttered a dry little laugh.

“Since when have you developed ideas of Oriental luxury?”

He laughed too. They often met in such waste-lands of humour, and, invariably ashamed, bolted back into the trim paths of sobriety, like truant but God-fearing children.

“Of course, with money, one could do a great deal of good,” she said.

“Undoubtedly,” he admitted.

“Unfortunately it seems to be all in the wrong hands. Most people who have money fritter it away in frivolities.”

Again Theophilus counselled repose. With Evelina platitude was a sure sign of fatigue. Men often have more knowledge of their wives than that with which their wives dream of crediting them; and thus is many a happy marriage maintained.

“I’m not going to leave you alone to talk business with Luke,” she declared finally. “Although he’s my own cousin, I trust him no further than I can see him.”

The electric bell of the front door clanged through the house. Theophilus rushed to anticipate the cook, who, in the process of washing-up and tidying the kitchen and preparing supper for herself and the holiday-making Florence, would not be in fit temper or attire to admit visitors. And, when Theophilus went, on rare occasions, to Cedar Hall, the door was opened by a devil of a fellow in glittering buttons and a gilded waistcoat.... Florence was trim enough, but cook ... no! Fancy the Messenger on his floor at the Home Office a beery fellow in rolled-up shirt-sleeves! The subversive Bolshevism of the idea scared him. Now, Evelina didn’t care who opened the door. Theophilus did. Although so much alike in tastes, there was that much of not unimportant difference between them.

A parade of furs seemed to enter with the bitterly cold air into the dimly-lit hall; furs and the faint scent of hot-house flowers and the disturbing sense of wealth and ease and laughter.

“Brrr! I’m frozen to death,” cried Daphne, huddling into her long mink coat, from whose lifted collar sprouted her dainty mocking head. “It’s an awful night. And Ole Luk Oie would have a bit of window down. Says he likes fresh air. I draw the line between fresh air and blizzards. No, thanks, Theophilus, I’ll keep my coat on until I’m thawed.”

Mere man not being granted the privilege of entering drawing-rooms in overcoats, Luke Wavering divested himself of a five-hundred-guinea covering, and spick and span, neat and precise, elegantly dapper in dinner-suit, followed Daphne into the drawing-room. He was of middle height, spare, clean-shaven, with the long face which instinctive imagination associates with that of the successful barrister; he had keen eyes, brown and round, with yellowish gleams—the eyes, according to a prejudiced Evelina, of a bird of prey. His thin, light-brown hair, trimly cut, was brushed back over an intelligent forehead.

Evelina, in her salmon-pink woolly shawl, received them with conventional politeness. Theophilus drew the molten poker from the grate and the little superstructure of coals fell down into a thin glowing slice.

“Put some more coal on, my dear,” said Evelina.

Theophilus, scoop in hand, dived into an empty scuttle. He stood helpless.

“Please don’t bother, my dear fellow,” said Luke Wavering. “All I’ve got to say can be said in ten minutes.... Do you mind my taking him off, Evelina? He has a cosy little den of his own, I remember.”

“And a gas-fire which burns up in no time,” said Theophilus. “Unhappily our parlourmaid’s out, and—er——”

“We can all go into the library if it comes to that,” said Evelina.

Daphne, who after looking over the various chairs had decided against them, and had perched herself on the solid Venetian table swinging her legs and smoking a cigarette through a long holder, cried out:

“Ole Luk Oie’s not going to give away business secrets before me; so, if you all go off, where do I come in?”

“You won’t come in, my child,” laughed her father. “You’ll stay with Evelina, while Theophilus and I have our talk....” He approached Evelina with a courteous gesture. “I’m sorry. But I’ve information for one pair of ears alone. Sworn secrecy, or nothing doing.”

“Surely my wife’s word’s as sacred as my own,” said Theophilus.

“I should be the last of men to doubt it,” said Luke. “But if your attitude is ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’.”

“Oh, Lord, what’s all that?” cried Daphne.

Luke turned to Evelina. “Would you ever think I gave this child an expensive education? It means ‘I fear the Greeks, especially when they bring gifts.’ Anyhow—if that’s your attitude—I can only say I’m sorry to have disturbed you, and clear out. Otherwise, there are my conditions of secrecy.”

Evelina shrugged her shoulders and yielded.

“All right. I know your wonderful secrets. Secrets de polichinelle. They make me laugh. Go along.”

They went, Theophilus somewhat apologetically. Evelina and Daphne were left alone.

“How do you think Luke’s looking?” asked the girl, with a sudden air of seriousness.

“The same as usual,” replied Evelina, to whom her cousin’s state of health was a matter of indifference.

“I don’t think so. He’s getting pasty-faced and worried. He works too hard. I’m always telling him so.”

“He can drop it any time he likes. Surely he has made enough money.”

“He says it’s easy enough to make, but the keeping of it is the very devil.”

“He needn’t spend so much,” said Evelina curtly.

“That’s nothing to do with it. Not what he means by keeping it, anyhow.” Daphne sighed, and looked at the point of a golden slipper. “I wish Luke would chuck it for a year or so, and let me take him round the world.”

“I may be old-fashioned,” said Evelina, “but to me it seems disrespectful to call your father by his Christian name. It was all very well when you were a child.”

“And it’s all the better now that I can be a companion to him,” cried Daphne, with a flash of dark eyes. “If I called him ‘Father’ he’d drop right down dead and want to know if I didn’t love him any more. ‘Ole Luk Oie,’ that’s nursery. ‘Luke’ for common talk. ‘Lukolunatic’ when he goes around playing the ass. By the way, what do you call Theophilus when he’s funny?”

The wearied Borough Councillor looked with distaste at youth in fur coat and silk stockings, and sought vainly for repartee. The most elementary sense of the grotesque forbade the obvious rebuke: “Theophilus is never funny.” ... The bright, fresh-coloured young face glowed at the scoring of a point. Her brown eyes laughed. She allowed herself a moment’s joy at her cousin’s embarrassment, and went on:

“I wish you’d tell me, Evelina, why all you people go on preaching dead superstitions. You’re not actually preaching, but you look as if you’d like to....”

“What superstitions?”

“Respect for elders, for instance, on the part of the very young—just because they are elders. You know very well you have no particular respect for them yourself. Why shouldn’t I make jokes about Theophilus?”

Here headstrong youth gave itself away.

“Because they’re in bad taste,” said Evelina.

“Sorry,” said Daphne.

She slipped off the table, and, crossing the room, flicked the end of her cigarette out of the holder into the fireplace.

“Why don’t you keep a dog?” she asked suddenly.

“My dear Daphne,” replied the long-suffering woman, “as Theophilus and I neither hunt nor shoot nor herd sheep nor have anything to fear from burglars, why should we keep such an abominably useless animal?”

Daphne, of whose existence a dog was as essential a part as a flower or a song, stood aghast at blasphemy. Vaguely she felt that the love of a dog was interfused in the lyrical expression of life.

“I dislike dogs,” Evelina continued, “and cats when they’re not occupied in catching mice. In fact, I dislike all useless beings, human and otherwise. Useless people are cumberers of the earth.”

Daphne threw back her cloak, revealing a gold-coloured frock, and leaned her elbow on the mantelpiece.

“I suppose you think me useless, Evelina?”

The dowdy, nervously and physically tired woman looked at her from her comfortless arm-chair, and saw incarnate the enemy of all her drab ideals.

“Since you’ve asked for it, my dear Daphne, you shall get it. I think you and your kind are the most contemptibly useless things in the universe.”

“We’re decorative, at any rate, aren’t we?” said Daphne, with rather a dangerous drawl.

Whereupon she drew a vanity case from her bag and ostentatiously occupied herself with mirror and lipstick. The fretted nerves of the elder woman gave way.

“Any hussy living on a man’s money can paint her face and dress herself up.”

“And any hussy,” cried the girl, gripping in each hand an instrument of adornment, “can keep a man’s house decent for him. I do. I run a big house. I’m useful. You run a small house. You ought to be more useful. It isn’t a question of money. I’m not a snob. Any fool of a woman can take care of a man. If Luke hadn’t a fire to sit by, I’d go out and hang myself. But here you let poor old Theophilus, to say nothing of everybody who comes into the place, get frozen to death, and you don’t care a tinker’s damn. So you’re utterly useless—and God knows you’re not decorative.”

Evelina had risen and stood, her sallow face pale with anger, at the door until the girl had finished.

“You little insolent beast,” she cried.

She burst into the library where the two men were talking, their chairs drawn up close to the gas-fire.

“I must ask you to take that little insolent beast”—she could find no alternative to the phrase which rang in her head—“out of my house at once, and never let me see her here again.”

“What’s all the rumpus about?” asked Luke, as they were driving home.

“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Daphne. “We got on each other’s nerves. She lives on brains, is utterly futile, and starves poor old Theophilus. So I told her exactly what I thought of her.”

“Do you think that was quite judicious?” he asked.

“Thank God, no,” said Daphne. “If you want a judicious woman, go and make love to Evelina.”

“She’s not a bad sort, really, you know,” Luke remarked, after the indulgent way of men.

“She’s negative. You yourself have said it. Negative, sexless, useless. At any rate I’m positive. We’re opposite poles. When we meet sparks fly.”

Luke Wavering chuckled dryly.

“You’re always astonishing me, my dear, by the results of your fantastic education.”