Читать книгу The Kingdom of Theophilus - William J. Locke - Страница 5

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THE months went on and Theophilus saw little or nothing of Luke. The breach between Evelina and Daphne forbade social relations.

The sardonic old Aunt Fanny in Hertfordshire, to whose house the two branches of the family were periodically bidden for a gaunt week-end, sometimes tried, by way of diversion, to bring them suddenly together. But, Evelina requiring from the old lady a definite assurance that she should not meet the unspeakable Daphne, Aunt Fanny found herself baulked of her whim by an elderly gentlewoman’s distaste both for lies and bad manners.

The Luke Wavering affairs were further eclipsed for the Birds by a General Election which shook, to the foundations of their being, the queer-minded in the country who attached importance to so absurd an event. Evelina stood for a Midland constituency, and was only defeated by some eight hundred votes. Pyrrhic or not, it was a famous victory. She established herself, in that section of the political world as yet unstupefied by universal jazzery, as a Marked Woman. She was invited to lecture all over Darker England.

Theophilus had less consciousness of her as the wife of his bosom than as a bit of amorphous garment that flapped now and then about the interior of the little Blackheath house, instead of being decently hung outside to dry. The cook drank the whisky and served up meals so sketchy that they might have appeared in the comic papers, and Florence, the house-parlourmaid, went to Picture Palaces whenever her beefy young admirer had the time or the condescension for escort. Theophilus, regarding Evelina as an Intellectuality and a Force, and sincerely interested in her activities, rarely complained. It seldom occurred to him that he had much to complain of. A cut off the joint or a wedge of cold pie, with vegetables ad libitum, at his Club—and Clubs, even in these narrow days, are over-generous in their helpings—provided him with such material sustenance for the day that anything swallowable satisfied his evening hunger. While Evelina was spreading the Gospel of Human Welfare in Pontypridd or Lowestoft, Theophilus spent his few hours of home life in reading about it in dull periodicals. His Saturday afternoons he usually passed in the Club reading-room over the weekly reviews. Now and then an exuberant acquaintance (with subsequent regret) led him to play a calamitous game of bridge. On Sundays he practised a round of hygienic and unenthusiastic golf. For he had taken to golf as he had taken to the Civil Service, to statistical reading, to marriage, in the unemotional hope of some good that might eventually accrue.

Daphne once described him as a lost soul trying to find itself.

During these months Daphne darted about in a dragon-fly fashion of her own, never straying far from the focal point of her existence, which was her father. She was just one and twenty, aflame with all the revelations of life which close touch with the modern throbbing world must of necessity afford to eager girlhood. She combined her father’s clear brain with her actress mother’s vivid sensuousness. Luke, seeking for temporary surcease from agony of care, took her on flying trips to the Continent. A week with her, no matter where—Paris, Rome, France, Monte Carlo, Sicily—he proclaimed the cure for all mortal ills.

They were sitting one mellow October day on the lofty terrace of Portofino, and the sunset splashed the sky above the dreaming western promontories with swathes of crimson and gold and elusive blues and greens. Daphne nestled against him, her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her. Presently he was aware of wetness on the back of his hand and, looking down, saw that she was in tears. Alarmed, he held her off so as to look at her.

“Why? ... my dear... ?”

“It’s so beautiful.” She broke away and laughed and hastily dried her eyes. “I didn’t realize I was crying. Beauty often makes me cry. Perhaps because it seems too much for our capacity. Don’t you find it so?”

“It’s a compensation, of course,” he said. “But only a small compensation for the world’s ugliness.”

“Ole Luk Oie, if you go on saying the world’s ugly, I’m not going to talk to you any more. What’s the matter with you?”

He smiled at her dryly. “A surfeit of ugliness, my dear.”

She protested her disbelief. Hadn’t he been her guide to Beauty ever since her eyes were opened? Hadn’t he told her stories in her babyhood which had set her a-dreaming all her life? Wasn’t his very name—the pet name, Ole Luk Oie—that of the dear gnome of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, who sprinkled dust in the children’s eyes so that they should sleep? All her remotest memories were those of a tender figure sprinkling in her eyes the golden dust of legend, so that she should dream of things sweet and beautiful.

In some such terms did she upbraid him for recalcitrance.

“Of course,” said she, “if you bring me up to find something to enjoy in any old thing—the smell of furs, this opalescent sea in front of us, dancing with a man who can dance, old Hock—it’s you, not me, that’s responsible for my palate, Andrea del Sarto—what else is there?—the Pyramids, San Marco in Venice, Debussy’s ‘Rain in the Garden.’ ...” She flickered her delicate long fingers amusedly before him ... “duck à la presse, and ... the Venus de Milo ... and I enjoy it and find beauty in everything, it’s an awful bump when you let me down and preach—wait—let me get it right, when you preach the essential ugliness of the world.” She patted both his cheeks. “That’s a damn good speech, isn’t it?”

He took her hands and looked deep into her eyes, and tried to smile.

“The perfect Hedonist,” said he.

But in his eyes she read something she had never read before—something compounded of defeat and despair and fear. She clutched him, moved by an unknown terror.

“Luke—Father dear—there’s something the matter. You’ve not been yourself for a long time. What is it?”

He touched her hands lovingly.

“Ordinary business worries, my dear. I thought we would escape from them for a bit by coming out here, but I had a wire from Daventry this afternoon which has rather upset me.”

“I wish Daventry were right there,” cried Daphne, pointing to the now pale Mediterranean. “At the bottom of the sea. He’s a beast.”

“If he were there, I’d be there too,” said Luke. “Let me tell you something—Ole Luk Oie turned philosopher. The hardest and perhaps the most impossible lesson that a woman has got to learn is that a man in his business or political life is a totally different creature from him in his social life.”

“I don’t see it at all,” said Daphne. “If a man’s a beast in a drawing-room he’s a beast in an office or anywhere else.”

Luke smiled with the weary indulgence of one who speaks to adored woman.

“But supposing he’s a highly gifted and powerful beast?”

“All the more reason for throwing him in there,” said Daphne, flinging a far-handed gesture out to sea.

Luke shivered. They had exceeded the time-limit of the balm of the Mediterranean air. He rose.

“Perhaps you are right, my child. Or, rather ... can you stand man’s philosophy? ... women are never right. But, on the other hand, they are never wrong. You can worry your little head over the paradox till all’s blue. In the meanwhile, if we stay here we’ll be frozen to death, and contract double pneumonia, and catch a filthy cold.”

She squeezed his arm as they went into the hotel.

“I think you must be feeling a bit better,” she said.

Early in the New Year the crash came, sudden, cataclysmic, complete. The details are written in letters of mire on the pages of recent financial history. Scarcely had twelve months passed between Luke’s visit to Theophilus Bird, radiant with visions of El Dorado, and his Lucifer-like fall. The lurid event shocked the City—even the individual units that form the conglomerate mass which moulds the financial destinies of most of the human race—even so unimportant a Cassandra-like unit as John Roberts, stockbroker and Chairman of the Finance Committee of the Greenwich Borough Council. Bankruptcy proceedings were swiftly followed by the flash of the Public Prosecutor.

Before puzzled financiers, distracted relations, and ruined shareholders in the companies promoted by the British and Overseas Trust Limited and other corporations, knew what to think, Luke Wavering and Emanuel Daventry stood in the dock of the Old Bailey and faced a criminal trial. It was the old story of financial juggling. A week was spent in tracing the intricate veins through which public money had trickled. But it was the same old dreary record of a fraudulence through which the names of honoured men have faded into the oblivion of gaol. In a few words, the simplest and yet, to the gambler, the most fascinating form of fraud. You float a company, and employ its capital to pay the dividends on the shares of a moribund predecessor, and so on, and so on, hoping to God, all the time, that, at last, Sunbeams and Cucumbers Ltd. may set you free, bring you a baronetcy at once, and land you, finally, on a flood-tide of gold, high and dry in the House of Lords. But, as the French say, there are faggots and faggots. Some may be employed in the honourable burning of heretics to the Greater Glory of God, and others may be set fire to just in order to get rid of them. Luke Wavering was one of the latter. Judge and jury found no use for him as a faggot. He had robbed the struggling parson, the widow and the orphan. He faced a judgment clear and merciless. His partner, Emanuel Daventry, the pig-faced man of Evelina’s detestation, pleaded ignorance of his hawk-eyed partner’s secret operations. There was remorseless raking of private lives. So foul were the disclosures of Daventry’s moral past evoked by prosecuting Counsel, that the eminent K.C. defending Daventry seized upon them as proof of his client’s innocence. For was it not obvious that, while he was sunk in the stews of dissoluteness, according to the evidence obtained at great pains by the prosecution, he must have neglected his business, and that his partner, an acute man of affairs, who had passed through the ordeal unscathed as a clean-living gentleman, should have been virtually in supreme control? On the enunciation of which daring paradox a transient gleam of mirth flitted over the crowded Court.

Which was the greater rogue of the pair, the man in the train, confused by the arraignment of complicated financial dealings involving ungraspable sums of money, could not rightly determine. Daventry, at any rate, was a peculiarly unpleasant fellow, while Wavering, the flower of domestic and gentlemanly virtues, might possibly be all the more a black-hearted hypocrite. The man reading his newspaper in the train could not solve the problem. At any rate, gross villainy had been committed.

Daphne sat with Mona Daventry, day after interminable day, in the well of the Court by the side of the solicitors for the defence. And she sat brave and smiling, defiantly championing the beloved one at unfair grips with fate. She willed her courage, faith and vitality into the tense-faced, dapper figure in the dock. It was unthinkable that he should be there for evil deeds of his own. Did not even the harsh-featured vulture in the wig bow before the evidence of a blameless life? The arch-rogue, the traitor, the Judas, the everything that was most vile, who sat next to him, was alone responsible for the trickery and fraud for which they stood jointly accused.

And every day, during the short interview she was allowed to have with him in the cheerless room below, he assured her of the certainty of his acquittal, and compared her radiance in the sordid Court with that of the life-giving sun.

“I’ve never been so proud of you,” he said one day. “I never dreamed it was ever possible for a father to be so proud of a daughter. To tell you to have faith and courage would be an insult.”

During these unhappy days, Theophilus once said to Evelina:

“Don’t you think you might hold out the olive branch to Daphne?”

She turned on him.

“Why?”

He was somewhat disconcerted by the crispness of the question.

“You’re the only woman relation she has got besides Aunt Fanny, and she must need some comfort, poor child.”

“If you’d read your newspapers, my dear, you’d see that she doesn’t. Every paper comments on her laughing and joking in court with that awful Daventry woman. She’s making an exhibition of herself. The child’s frivolous to her soul. She doesn’t seem to be conscious of the degradation of her position.” She rummaged among an untidy pile on the lower tier of a cane table, and produced an illustrated morning paper. “Look at that. All furs and smiles and silk stockings. ‘Miss Daphne Wavering leaves the Old Bailey.’ Might just as well have been: ‘Miss Tottie Fay leaves the stage-door to step into her motor-car.’ ”

“I don’t think any actress would call herself Tottie Fay nowadays,” said Theophilus, with a new and curious prompting of antagonism.

She shrugged her kimono-covered shoulders—it was after dinner.

“You know perfectly well what I mean. Anyhow, if she wants me she can come to me. I’m always here.”

“Yes. That’s so,” said Theophilus. And his dryness was imperceptible to the untrained senses of his wife.

But the next day he again misappropriated Government time and, abusing privilege by scribbling “Home Office” on the card which he sent in to those in authority, was allotted a seat in the low-set gallery reserved for the Aldermen and Councillors of the City of London. He found a seat at the end of the front row, on the left, only separated by the gangway from the dock. Luke’s eyelids flickered when he met his greeting smile, and a spot of colour came into his pale cheeks. Daphne saw him, and there was gladness in her eyes. The dry and technical cross-examination of accountants was in progress, interrupted now and then by the judge who put an elucidatory question for the benefit of the jury. Theophilus couldn’t make much of it one way or the other.

When the Court adjourned for luncheon, Theophilus met Daphne and Mrs. Daventry in the corridor outside. The latter was a pleasant-faced woman in her middle thirties. Although sharing with Evelina her righteous detestation of Daventry, he had never been able to find in his heart grounds for positive dislike of his wife. Now that she had divorced him in circumstances that gained her public sympathy, he found himself suddenly confronted with a personality both attractive and courageous. For Daphne’s sake alone had she, for the second time, sat in open court, listening to the tale of Emanuel Daventry’s depravities.

“She’s the dearest of dears,” cried Daphne. “I don’t know what I should have done without her.”

“You’d have been in court all the same,” said Mrs. Daventry.

“Yes. But by myself. It would have been hard to stick it. Your being with me makes all the difference.”

This was, of course, after her first greeting of Theophilus. She had come to him with arms outstretched.

“Oh, Theophilus dear, how good of you to come! You don’t know what the sight of a kind face means to us. Those deadly people in the seats where you are, with cold eyes and hard mouths; and women powdering their noses; all looking from me to him and hoping for the worst, like guests of the Inquisition in reserved stalls at an auto-da-fé. God! How I hate them. Sometimes I could get up and scream at them, though you know I’m not hysterical—so the sight of you....” She laughed with moist eyes.

They emerged into the great vestibule, where the thin, outgoing crowd of the public and witnesses from the various courts was crossed by hurrying wigged and gowned barristers on their way to eventual food.

“When this horror is over,” said Daphne, “I’m going to take him to Egypt—to Assouan, where there’s perpetual sunshine, so that he can sit in the sun and get his dear soul warm.” She put both hands on Theophilus’s arm. “Don’t you think it monstrous that he should be there?”—she flung a vague gesture towards the courts—“through no fault of his own.”

“Of course it’s monstrous, Daphne,” said Theophilus with stiff kindness, “but he’ll get off.”

Daphne flashed. “Naturally he’ll get off. But to be dragged through all this mud! He’s so sensitive, the soul of honour—of—of every thing wonderful!”

“I know, I know, Daphne,” he said consolingly.

He had the chivalrous idea of asking them to lunch. He took out his watch. The conscience of the Perfect Official knocked the Man endwise. He must have a hasty meal somewhere, and get back to the office.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

Daphne waved a hand to her companion. “With Mona, in Albert Hall Mansions; where else? Cedar Hall’s shut up. I don’t even know whether it belongs to Luke any more.... Aunt Fanny offered to take me in, but she understands that I must be on the spot.”

“I wish I could be of some use to you,” said Theophilus.

“I’m sure you do. But it’ll be all over soon. So don’t worry. I can see it through.”

“You’re a brave girl,” said he, “to face it like this.”

She smiled and shrugged. “It’s the least I can do to try to cheer him up. If I went about in black with white cheeks and hollow eyes, looking like nothing on earth, it wouldn’t be very helpful to him, would it?”

Theophilus assented cordially. He lingered a few moments until the call of duty summoned him away.

When he got home, Evelina said:

“Have you read to-day’s evidence in the evening papers?”

He nodded.

“Things look black against him,” she said. “I can’t understand, at the best, how the man could have been such a fool.”

“I was in Court this morning for an hour or two,” he remarked off-handedly. “I thought I’d like to see for myself ...”

“I don’t think it was very wise of you, considering——”

They argued the point amicably. He gave a dry description of the scene.

“And Daphne?”

“She was there, of course. I spoke to her. I think, my dear,” he said, with the deliberate slowness of his official manner, “that your judgment of her last night was not quite fair.”

She smiled. “My dear Theophilus, if there’s one thing in this world I’ve trained myself to be, it is utterly just.”

With a little bow of acknowledgment he put before her the case of Daphne, as he had heard it from her lips. He pleaded that she was doing for her father all that lay in her girl’s power.

“Then perhaps I was wrong.”

She made the dry admission with the air of a Committee woman withdrawing from an untenable position in the face of a new set of facts. He commended her with equal dryness.

“I’m glad to hear you say that, Evelina. Perhaps justice is the greatest and the most difficult to attain of all human virtues.”

They dined early, as she was engaged to speak at an eight o’clock meeting at Lewisham, whither he had promised to accompany her. But at the last moment he found himself driven to invent excuses: work that he had brought home from the office to make up for the hours of borrowed time; also the threatening signs of a cold caught perhaps in the germ-infected railway carriage that morning. There had been a wheezing and sniffling man who had insisted on tightly-shut windows ... Yet he accompanied her to the taxi in his thin old dinner-suit.

She said, turning on the cab step:

“Have you thought what a difference all this is going to make to my career?”

She drove off; he entered the house and, sitting before the gas-fire in his library, tried to read. But he couldn’t. Yes. He supposed the conviction of Luke would react on Evelina’s high ambitions. The fear had been running through his head, and naturally through Evelina’s, all the time; but this was the first occasion on which she had formulated it in definite phrase. Yet he was shocked, he knew not why, by the brusque pronouncement. It dismissed from consideration another woman’s immediate agony of suspense. Evelina had yielded to a sense of abstract justice; but she had remained merciless. The picture of the other woman rose before him—the girl with the darting, generous hands, the flower-like young face, the eyes haunted beyond their brightness—and his heart was suddenly torn by an anguish of pity.

For he knew that all the girl’s splendid hopes were vain; that all the King’s Counsel and all the King’s men could not set up Luke Wavering once more in his place; that Luke was doomed. It was a family disgrace; no one could get away from the fact. Yet there seemed to be a world of tragic difference between Evelina’s discomfiture and Daphne’s despair. He forgave or forgot all past insolences. He saw her only as a thing of fresh and valiant beauty, heartrendingly pathetic, that stood out radiant in the vast and fog-hung hall of the Old Bailey.

To the last, the man reading his newspaper in the train was confronted by the problem of the greater villain of the two men that stood accused. The jury solved it for him by acquitting Daventry and finding the other guilty.

Luke Wavering was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.