Читать книгу The Kingdom of Theophilus - William J. Locke - Страница 7

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ACCORDING to a very wise philosopher, money is any old thing you choose, or circumstances allow you, to make of it. It’s as idiotic to call it a curse as to regard it as an unmitigated blessing. In any hands, whether strong or palsied, virtuous or vicious, it certainly means power. It dawned gradually on the upright Theophilus that it meant power over Evelina.

Suddenness of impulse or thought was not one of his characteristics. He had ever walked in dull wariness. His opinions, tastes and habits had been beaten out by the patient hammering of years. Thus, this lightning change of fortune did not immediately transform him—to use an extravagant figure of speech—from grub to butterfly. He had already undergone a preparatory process of development during the acquisition of his secret fortune. He had hugged himself as a happy miser. The hoard had become a subtly delicious expression of his own personality. The sober contemplation of it gave him the vague feeling that thus he could sport in the sunshine not overshadowed by Evelina. The idea of sporting was an essentially subjective conception in the mind of the unimaginative man. That he might sport with some Amaryllis in the shade never entered his head.

The damp twilight prowl around the grounds of The Grange led only to an accelerated continuance of his joy in acquisitiveness. He realized that this estate with its four-square Early Georgian house and its many acres of meadow and pasture farm-lands and tenements and messuages, as described in the romantic legal phraseology of the will, was his very own. He could turn it into a race-course or a Garden City, or set fire to it, and there would be no one to say him nay; not even Evelina. He glowed in the pride of possession, so that he lost his way in the dark of a little copse beyond the greenhouses.

They returned to Blackheath in time for late dinner, the car (his car) taking them to Moorstead railway station. Over the usual uninspiring meal they continued their mild discussion of the new condition of affairs. Evelina, having enunciated the proposition that Aunt Fanny had every right to dispose of her property in her own way, could not logically declare a personal grievance. Pride also forbade any sign of the querulous. She prided herself on her dignity. Besides, what did it matter? Man and wife were one: two minds with but a single thought, that thought being hers. Her trust in Theophilus was infinite.

“You’ll have to consider what to do with The Grange. It’s rather a white elephant. You could easily let it furnished. Rich Americans are always looking about for such places ... characteristic old English homes.”

Theophilus smiled. “Don’t you think it’s perhaps too characteristic? Not a bath-room in the place ...”

“That’s true,” said Evelina thoughtfully.

In spite of her disregard of luxurious living, she had been born into a modern world of essential plumbing. Even in their house in the Byfield Road there was a bath-room, somewhat dingy, and the hot water supply dependent on the humours of the cook and the kitchen fire. But, at any rate, a bath-room. She had agreed with Luke and Daphne in their condemnation of the barbarous survival at The Grange of the bedroom bath-tub.

“We can easily put some in,” she added brightly.

“No difficulty at all. I know an architect at the club—Bindon. He builds hotels. Just the man.” He stared into the unfathomable distance. “I should like,” said he, “a great big bath-room to myself. I’ve always wanted it. One big enough to do my physical exercises in comfortably. In ours, for instance, I’m always barking my knuckles and shins against sharp edges.”

“But as you’re not going to live there,” she smiled good-humouredly, “I don’t see the point of it. I don’t know how you feel,” she said after a while, “but, personally, I don’t see why we should change our mode of life merely because we’ve come into a great deal of money. Our interests continue to be the same.”

“You wouldn’t contemplate living at The Grange?” he asked tentatively.

She started. “Good heavens, no! An enormous house with a regiment of servants! What should we do there? It would take me all day to get to Greenwich and back.”

Theophilus supposed it would. He reflected that his wife was a strong woman whom no temptations of Fortune would move from the path which she had chosen to travel. Had she control of the money, God knows what plans she would have made for the Advancement of Human Welfare. He was willing, of course, to aid her, within reason. If she found a seat in Parliament, her great ambition, she would have no cause for complaint. But her suggestion of the continuance of their present mode of life did not awaken enthusiastic response. He looked around the dingy, cramped room and contrasted it with his dining-room, airy, spacious, majestic, where a man could breathe. He thought, too, of the library of The Grange which he could fill with all the books he had ever craved to possess, and in its turn contrasted it with his own little shabby den, and its crowded inadequate book-space. And he thought of the bath-room at Chesham Towers whither, when he was official private secretary to the Minister of the day, he had once been invited for a week-end. He could have played squash rackets in it, or run a Marathon race.... He became conscious of a wild desire to live in his house.

The casual talk of husband and wife wandered from the immediate subject of residence. There were many cognate topics, new and exciting, old and reimbued with vital interest. Aunt Fanny and her eccentricities; Daphne and her future; a telephone call had established the fact of her present safety with Mona Daventry. “The sort of woman she would go to,” said Evelina. Then there was the eternal tragedy of Luke.

“This will be a crushing blow to him,” said Theophilus.

“He deserves what he’s got. Look at the thousands he has ruined. I refuse to be sentimental.”

“He has done you no great harm, at any rate,” said Theophilus.

She assented grudgingly, for it was true. She remained, unchallenged, an influential member of the Greenwich Borough Council, and the prospective party candidate for the Midland constituency which she had contested at the last General Election. But, all the same, the family disgrace weighed heavily on her soul.

For the first time, perhaps, in his decently ordered life, Theophilus spent a sleepless night, for which Daphne was more or less responsible. Every time he tried to concentrate his mind on the Higher Drama, or Bradley, whose philosophical work he had just discovered, or the Factory Acts which claimed the morrow’s attention, there rose before him the picture of a girl with supple figure and eager face, and her words rang insistently in his ears: “Have a hell of a time with it.”

What she meant he could not exactly fathom, but the ordinance suggested disturbing possibilities. Men of wealth having a hell of a time squandered their money on race-horses and on dancing-halls and on yachts in which they took strange goddesses to exotic lands. Attired in immaculate, diamond-studded, camellia-adorned evening dress, they drank champagne all night long. They ran unimaginable riot at Monte Carlo. They belonged to that social over-world which Evelina and he, knowing little about it, hated and scorned as the lowest under-world of culture. Gradually Daphne’s ordinance stimulated his imagination to a nightmare of wondrous potentialities. First and foremost there was Freedom, which signified the Liberty of Life, the sanction to go about the world without caring a damn for anybody. His unprecedented waking dreams danced him through realms of fantastic romance. Pictures rose before him of a yacht with white bellying sails; a Reckitt’s blue sea; a shore with a fringe of snowy foam curdling on an island’s golden sand; palms, dusky shapes of hibiscus-garlanded girls; the presence by his side of something languorous, seductive, in vague female guise.... A gaming-table on which in reckless excitement he threw gold and more gold, while bands played maddening music and the froth bubbled out of gold-necked bottles.... He beheld himself, free and unshackled, once intellectually forbidden and austerely despised, libertine, master of all the delights of the Earth. He started up in bed, suddenly horror-stricken. For the first time in his life he seemed to have a glimpse of himself that wasn’t himself. What did his excited fancy mean? Had he secretly, subconsciously, hankered after these voluptuous things throughout his past decorous years? Was it the case of a luxury-complex? Hitherto he had shrunk from the indecent nakedness of Freudism. What did it mean? He rose in the black middle of the night and groped for a glass of water, and went to bed again, only once more to toss about in despair and wakefulness, and to hear the girl’s voice clear and insistent: “Have a hell of a time with it.”

Towards morning, however, he passed from nightmare into the cold region of Thought. He went down to breakfast tired, ashamed, yet determined. A cool Evelina poured out his Mocha Paste coffee and diluted it with cold milk. As he tasted it, he reflected that at The Grange on the previous morning the milk had been hot and the coffee fragrant. From the breakfast dish he helped himself to a kipper, skinny and over-dried. He remembered the luscious kidneys on the sideboard of the house that was his. He endured the meal uncomplainingly while Evelina read the copy of “The Times” which he, in his turn, would read in the railway carriage. It was a morning of pouring rain.

He looked at his watch.

“Has Florence rung up a taxi?”

“My dear, I’m so sorry ... I never told her.”

She pressed the electric button on the table. The maid, somewhat slatternly in print dress, appeared.

“Why haven’t you got a taxi for your master?”

Theophilus stopped argument. No taxi would enable him to catch his train. A private car, ordered from the Formosa Garage, would take him to the office in time. Evelina laughed.

“Of course, you can afford it now.”

“It seems odd,” said Theophilus, “but we’ve a car of our own at Moorstead. I’ll have it sent up to town to-day.”

Evelina passed her hand over her eyes.

“I suppose we have,” she said helplessly. “Everything seems so complicated since yesterday.”

Twenty minutes later, the hireling car drew up before the gate. Florence announced its arrival. He took leave of Evelina, and broke precedent by forgetting “The Times.”

At the door he turned.

“By the way, my dear, I gave the matter much thought last night, and I’ve decided to live at The Grange as soon as possible.”

Thus came to an astounded lady the first revelation of her husband as a Man of Character. She was filled with gasping and helpless resentment. The night before she had given him a cogent reason for continuing to live in Blackheath. How could she possibly carry on her work at Greenwich from Head Quarters in West Herts? And now Theophilus, in an incisive sentence, had scrapped Greenwich as of no account. It was amazing. It was as though the family cat (had she possessed one) should get upon its hind legs and help itself to a whisky and soda, and autocratically bid her fetch it a cigar.

She, too, had lain awake much of that night, and her thoughts had turned now and then to her own ambitions. Very little would turn the vote of Maresfield, her nursed constituency, in her favour. The Infirmary badly needed a new wing. If she headed a subscription list, say with £20,000, the grateful town would surely send their benefactress to represent it in Parliament. But now she was beset by horrid doubt of Theophilus’s complacency. Heaven knew what the suddenly developed Man of Character would choose to do with his money. It was his money. She had no legal right to dispose of a penny of it. The thought galled. She almost hated Theophilus as an interloper between herself and the Wavering fortune, her natural and lawful inheritance. She wondered whether she had ever understood the wooden, unemotional man that was her husband. Beyond the workings of a formal intellect which she respected, what went on, otherwise, in his brain?

She faced a day of pelting worry, wherein she was brought up against the lachrimæ rerum, the Tearful Dismalness of Human Things. Soot fell down the neglected dining-room chimney, so that the room became a greasy horror of smut. The summoned sweep, having washed himself for the afternoon and settled down to tobacco and beer, and the construction of a rabbit-hutch for his children, arrived with the air of a man peculiarly aggrieved, and treated her with studied impoliteness. He proclaimed justification in having voted against her at the last election for the Greenwich Borough Council. Any woman of sense would have called him in a couple of months ago. It was hard to bear. Then, Florence, the parlour-maid, gave notice. She was going to get married to the beefy young man with whom she had been keeping company for some time past. The cook served up for her lunch a cold ragged mutton bone. Evelina professed a lofty disregard of food; but, after all, she didn’t like it to smell of mice. To drive the fainting lady to distraction, a leading bore from Maresfield called on behalf of the local Temperance Society, and summoned her to declare her support of Prohibition in her next address to the constituency. As she was devoting the catastrophic day to the drafting of the speech in question, she was at much pains to disguise her ill-humour. The dreadful man stayed for tea, wolfed the meagre thin bread and butter and half a dozen dry fancy biscuits, and looked disappointedly around for cake. Accustomed to boiled fish, or bloaters, or, at least, shrimps as a relish to his tea, he departed, a declared enemy to the tactless lady.

Lastly there came a telephone message from Theophilus that he was detained, and would not be home for dinner. Evelina went early to bed with a cup of Bovril, the “Hibbert Journal” and a headache.

Now Theophilus, kindly and over-wrought soul, thought much during the busy official day of Daphne who had so greatly influenced his waking dreams. She stood out a tragic figure. As the newly constituted Head of the Family, it was his duty to concern himself with her material welfare. He must consult Widdington and see what could be done. Meanwhile, he was aware of a curious longing to meet her and to convince himself that, for the present at least, she was in a quiet harbour of refuge. This insistent desire, and the hired car which he had kept all day, swept him towards evening through the murky and traffic-blocked thoroughfares to Mona Daventry’s flat in Albert Hall Mansions.

A dainty drawing-room, a leaping fire, the fragrance of tea and cigarettes, and two fair women welcomed him.

“I knew you would come. I felt it. I told Mona, didn’t I?”

So Daphne, brightly triumphant. Theophilus, confused, asked why.

“I just knew it. That’s all. You wouldn’t be you if you hadn’t.” She paused for a laugh. “To your academic mind that must sound rotten English. But it’s true.”

“It’s perfect and—and—delightful English,” said Theophilus. “Of course the proposition is not self-evident.”

Mrs. Daventry rang for fresh tea. He held up protesting hands. He had had tea at the office. He had only run in for a minute to get news of Daphne.

“A cocktail, then?”

“Not alone....”

“Oh, I’ll join you.”

The maid appeared. Cocktails were ordered. Theophilus glowed in the warmth and the cosiness and the unaccustomed sense of feminine environment. Mona Daventry was pretty and pleasant. She had a soft voice and a sympathetic intelligence. Daphne talked, as ever, in flashes. Time wore on. Presently Mrs. Daventry left them on some domestic pretext. Theophilus, standing with his back to the fire, looked down on Daphne in the long, low chair. She had shed the mourning of the day before, and in an old, short-skirted, deep red frock, beneath which shapely legs were crossed, she appeared singularly vivid in the man’s eyes.

“My dear Daphne,” said he, “there’s something I want to say to you.”

She sprang to her feet and put her hands on his shoulders as swiftly but not so wildly as she had done the day before.

“You’re going to talk family business. I see it in your eye. If you do, I go straight out of the room.”

He smiled and touched her hand for a second.

“In that case,” said he, “I’ll communicate with you through my solicitors.”

“You can communicate with me through the Lord Chancellor if you like, and I’ll turn him down.”

“But you don’t know the nature of the communication.”

“Yes, I do. You’re a transparent glass man, electrically lit inside. Evelina said something about a family arrangement. I lost my temper. I was abominably rude and brutal. You must forgive me. I recognize all Evelina’s good qualities. What she said she meant kindly and generously. But whenever we meet we clash. It’s my fault. I can’t help it. Well, as I was saying about Evelina ... you’ve come on the same errand—in your own way. Isn’t it true?”

“Why, of course,” said Theophilus. “I have everything and you have nothing. It’s grossly unfair. Besides, I couldn’t bear to have you hate me as a usurper.”

She protested. They argued a while.

“You must consider my feelings as a decent man,” said he.

“Oh, dear!” she cried, passing an impatient hand across her face, “we’ve come to the discussion that I said we wouldn’t have. If you were anybody else but Theophilus Bird, I’d stamp my foot and swear I wouldn’t touch a penny of your beastly money, and plant you there, and go out and never see you again. As it is, I’ve told you I’m glad you’ve got the money. I don’t talk through my hat, even when I’m half crazy. But I’m not going to listen to any proposition you may have in mind. It’s silly nonsense to talk about being a usurper.”

“But, my dear Daphne,” exclaimed Theophilus, with the one unaccountable burst of emotion he had experienced in his life, “I’d give the heart out of my body to be of service to you.”

“You would?”

“I’ve said it.”

The man of scientific mind and official training, precise as to the exactness of the spoken word, instinctively resented the doubt implied in the question. He drew himself up, dignified. Raw-boned, falcon-nosed, clean-featured, he had a presence. So had Daphne, slim, erect in her young dark beauty. The mutual play of eyes was almost antagonistic. There was a silent moment of poignant suspense; a moment, to Theophilus, pregnant with unknown issues. What was in the girl’s mind he could not conjecture; yet, within the dark fastnesses of his soul, he was aware of a moment of destiny. On that moment depended the blotting out of Daphne from his life, or her continuance therein as a thing of grace and wonder, if not of vague and unformulated desire.

“You say you’d give your heart out of your body to do me a service,” she repeated.

He made a slight motion of assent.

“Then promise to give your hand in friendship to my father when he comes out of prison. That’s all—absolutely all. I’ll hear of nothing else.”

He realized, so subtle are the workings of the subconscious mind, that he had been expecting the challenge all the time, and that he had been prepared to yield. He held out his hand.

“I promise, my dear,” he said simply.

The tensity of the spell was broken. She lapsed into the modern girl bravely facing disastrous circumstance. She flung herself into a chair, threw herself back, then leaned forward eagerly.

“I was sure you would. That’s all I care for or think about in the world. All his other friends, the people that used to come and stay with us and eat his dinners, have deserted him—melted away like dirty snow. Those money-people whom he had to associate with, how I used to loathe them! You’ve never felt like that—never wanted to take a comb and comb all money out of the men? Or—the women—well, to go behind them and take hold of their ropes of pearls and draw them tight and hear them say ‘couic’.” She laughed. “You’ve got an angelic mind. I haven’t. I’d like to see them all fry in their own fat. The girls are just as bad. I’m dropped. I’m a filthy disease. There’s only Mona—the dearest of dears—and now you——”

He had sunk into the opposite chair by the fire.

“A comparative dear, I hope,” said he, in an old-fashioned way.

“A positive dear.”

“Then that’s all right,” said he.

She handed him a cigarette box. They talked. What were her immediate plans? She declared her intention to find work. Mona, in her generosity, had offered her a home for an indefinite period. But Mona was a woman of the world with a large acquaintance, and, for all her great-heartedness, would soon feel the social encumbrance of a pariah in her house. Besides, a week’s loving hospitality could be accepted in all honour—a very different thing from a year’s charity, however kindly dispensed. Theophilus need have no fear. She spoke two or three languages. She could draw rather neatly. She had mastered the mysteries of the shorthand-typist so that, when Luke and herself had gone on jaunts abroad together, he had no need to cast about for a secretary to attend to his incessant correspondence.

“I’m worth my weight in coppers, at any rate.”

“I should say in Bank of England notes,” he said, with a smile.

She laughed, tickled by a sense of the incongruous. Theophilus and gallantry! He reminded her of an ancient admiral who used to make her pretty compliments when she was a child of fifteen. She remembered describing him to her father as a beloved old ass. Youth asserted itself.

“I’ll go now as far as to say that you’re more than a dear.”

The talk wandered into lighter airs. The entrance of Mrs. Daventry, who had changed into a semi-evening frock, caused Theophilus to spring up. He had been unconscious of the flight of time. He must go. Dinner awaited him at Blackheath. The hireling chauffeur of his hireling car must be sodden with rain and chill and misery.

“Why not send him off to get food and warmth, and stay and dine with us?” said Mrs. Daventry.

“Do,” said Daphne.

Theophilus struggled against conscience, duty, meek habit, and all sorts of conjugal complexities. He had never done such a thing before. On the other hand, Evelina had left him stranded a thousand times at a solitary meal without the pretence of compunction.

“A message to Mrs. Bird is a matter of a minute,” urged his hostess.

Theophilus hesitated, again confronting contrast—the indefinable charm of his surroundings, material and human, with the comfortless house and the ever courteously bleak Evelina.

“It’s awfully kind of you,” he stammered, “but—er——”

“If there are lions in the path,” laughed Daphne, “they can all be shoo’d away down the telephone. I’ll fix everything.”

She darted out. Theophilus stood helpless. He confessed with a queer little twist of his lips:

“I’d really like to stay. Very much indeed.”

“It’d be a Christian act,” said Mona Daventry, with a touch of seriousness. “The child’s in the depths, up to her neck. You mustn’t be taken in by her manner. That’s her way—you know what she is, as well as I do. If she was drowning and came up for the last time, she’d have something brave and defiant to fling out....”

Theophilus murmured: “I’m sure she would.”

“She’d keep her end up to the last.... I believe you and I are the only two people she trusts in the world, apart from her father. She thinks him a martyred saint. But for practical purposes he’s no good to her; in fact, worse than useless.”

“Does she ever see him?” he asked.

“No. From the first he made that definite. You can quite understand him, can’t you? The hideous prison, his clothes, the degradation of it all.... He won’t allow her to have the shock of it. The poor devil’s suffering the tortures of the damned. I know it. He may be this, that, or the other, but, at any rate, his life was wrapped up in Daphne, and hers in him. They might have been taken for lovers.... There was a lot of rotten gossip, of course....”

“I never believed it,” said Theophilus.

“You were quite right. Whatever his amours were, he kept them secret. I’m not a silly ass of a woman to expect a man of Luke’s temperament to be a saintly celibate. Why on earth should he? All that, anyhow, is between himself and his God, and whatever little ladies there may have been. I say may have been—just to give the poor man a chance as a human being....”

Theophilus smiled. “Your philosophy is wonderful, Mrs. Daventry.”

She threw out a hand. “I’m a woman of the world. Heaven knows I’ve had lessons enough. But listen. I’m only taking things—supposed things—at their very worst. What matters is that no one has ever been able to pin Luke down to any particular woman. And no woman has ever—even in shadow—come between Luke and Daphne since her mother died when she was three years old. As I’ve said, Luke may be all that he’s convicted for—how can you or I tell?—but his love for Daphne must be accounted to him for righteousness.”

Theophilus assented with a sigh. It was a miserable business altogether. He quite appreciated Luke’s attitude.

“And Daphne?”

“They’re too much in touch for her not to understand. But she suffers.... Do you know what she said to me? ‘It’s only for Luke’s sake that I accepted the legacy flung at me by that horrid old woman.’ ”

“When I think of Daphne I go about feeling like a brute,” said Theophilus.

“Don’t worry,” she smiled reassuringly. “Daphne has no grudge against you. Quite the contrary. Whatever she has told you she means. She’s nothing if not splendidly blatant.... What she’d do if she fell in love, God knows. When that happens a woman gets all tied up in knots, and she doesn’t know how the devil to undo herself. That’s the whole secret, my dear man, of the Mystery of Woman which you all talk so much about. There’s nothing to it, really.”

“I wonder,” said Theophilus.

Mona Daventry had a pleasant laugh; also white teeth and quietly smiling eyes; also a quick intelligence. He began to detect a certain dull-wittedness in Evelina’s summary criticisms of this charming lady.

“Wonder as much as you like,” she cried gaily, “and go on wondering. We live by it. We’re the greatest frauds on earth. That is to say”—she made a pause so as to twist to the serious—“until sex comes along with all its clamours. But apart from that ... what were we talking about? Daphne. Well, she’s untouched—as far as I know. Diana. And she’s the realest thing that ever lived.”

On these words Daphne came back, with the bland announcement that everything had been arranged. And thus it befell that Theophilus passed a singularly agreeable evening, while Evelina, his wife, drank Bovril and read the “Hibbert Journal” in bed.

It is remarkable that not one of the three women concerned thought of Theophilus as a selfish brute.