The Kingdom of Theophilus E-Book

William J. Locke

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

THE KINGDOM OF THEOPHILUS

BY

WILLIAM J. LOCKE

1927

© 2022 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383836483

THE

KINGDOM OF THEOPHILUS

CHAPTER I

T

HEOPHILUS 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.”

CHAPTER II

T

HEOPHILUS, in spite of assiduous sociological and statistical reading, could never arrive at a definite conception of Luke Wavering’s activities in the City. He knew that he was interested in many companies, that he was chairman of a great concern—“The British and Overseas Trust Limited”—and that he made a great deal of money. Personally he was not at all displeased that Luke should make a great deal of money, seeing that every now and again the Maker of Money, out of the kindness of his heart, put him in the way of making money too. The process was both simple and agreeable. On receipt of a message from Luke, he had but to instruct the manager of his bank to buy so many shares in such-and-such an undertaking, and, on another message, to instruct the manager to sell out. Sometimes even he would receive communications from The British and Overseas Trust Limited to the effect that they had bought so many shares for such a sum, and sold them for such a greater sum; and begged him to acknowledge the receipt of an enclosed cheque. Thus, within the last two or three years, the modest £2000 of Theophilus’s savings had increased to £15,000 which he invested in War Loan, both through prudence and at the advice of Wavering.

Most of these transactions he hid from Evelina, whose attitude towards her cousin’s methods of money-making was coldly unsympathetic. She had her own little patrimony of two or three hundred a year invested in Municipal and Colonial Stock, which she threw into the joint account that was complemented by her husband’s official salary. On that they lived. He dispensed petty cash, paid all bills, and every half-year, in January and July, when he received his pass-book from the Bank, made the neatest possible balanced statement of accounts in a special leather-covered book which he submitted formally to the inspection of his wife. He was methodical, precise, official. That the joint income must be accounted for, Evelina took as a matter of course. Was she not a member of the Finance Committee of the Greenwich Borough Council? She respected him as the perfect accountant.

That it was wrong and disingenuous on the part of Theophilus to open a secret banking account of his own, and keep on deposit the interest on his gambler’s fortune, no conscientious person can deny. But when a man’s wife will only try to do general good with his money, without any particular benefit to himself, his villainy may be pardoned by those who view human error with a certain indulgence. On the other hand, the secret joy of Theophilus in amassing a miser’s treasure may most reasonably be deplored. Again—such can be the strophe and antistrophe of argument—why should he deny himself the only Puckish delight afforded him by ironical circumstance?

“I’ve done with those two for ever,” said Evelina, as soon as the door had shut behind her cousins. “That child is the most odious product of modern decadent civilization, and I’m perfectly certain that Luke isn’t straight.”

“Daphne no doubt is trying,” Theophilus admitted, “but what’s wrong with Luke?”

“I don’t know,” said Evelina. “You might just as soon ask me what’s wrong with a bad smell.”

“I’m sorry,” said Theophilus, “but I really like Luke.”

She shrugged her thin shoulders beneath the pink woolly wrap. They were standing in the hall.

“I don’t pry into your affairs, my dear, any more than you pry into mine. That was part of our agreement when we married—and I’ve observed it religiously”—Theophilus wondered whether he had been as astutely secretive as he had imagined—“but I warn you. If you put any trust in Luke—and I say it although he’s my own cousin—you’ll be a fool and live to repent it.”

Theophilus held his peace. He had the unemotional man’s wisdom of silence. His natural kindliness, too, forbade touching on raw nerves. He looked down on her with the affection of habit, and saw an exhausted and irresponsible woman. He smiled.

“There’s nothing to worry about as far as I’m concerned; but as far as you’re concerned, I am worried. You go off to bed. I’ll lock up and put out the lights. I’ll read a little before I turn in.”

He put his arm round her, and she laid her head against him. She confessed to the awful weariness consequent on a day’s hard work and to a splitting headache brought on suddenly by the girl’s insolence. They parted with a conventional peck of lips. Theophilus went into his library to think over the interrupted revelation of Luke’s El Dorado.

Impeccable official though he was, he nevertheless stole an hour from Government time the next morning in order to interview Luke in the gorgeous offices of The British and Overseas Trust Limited in Aldwych. Luke, bearing no malice for overnight happenings—of what account were women’s squabbles in the serious affairs of men?—received him cordially. He went out dazed, cheated the Government of another half-hour, which he spent in his bank manager’s parlour. When he got home that evening he said nothing of his petty larceny of Government time to Evelina. Recovered from her fatigue, and perhaps mindful of the odious child’s criticism, she warmed the house against his arrival, set before him an edible roast leg of mutton, and took him off to a cheery performance at Croydon of “Titus Andronicus” given by the New Shakespearean League.

For a month Theophilus lived the life of the exultant gambler. Never before had his following of Luke’s gospel given him such a cumulation of daily thrills. Indeed, he regarded Luke less as an apostle than as a god. Himself, admitted into a tiny band possessed of secret information, he considered as one of the Chosen. For, lo, what Luke had predicted had come true. Shares in a moribund mine were bought for a song. None but the small hierarchy knew of the new rich vein of life that had just been discovered. The shares mounted daily in dizzying leaps. Although Theophilus read his journal of physical offence every morning in the crowded railway carriage, the serried columns swam mistily before his eyes while one little entry danced over them, will-o’-the-wisp fashion, in letters of fire. At last the price quoted reached such astounding heights that he grew fearful. Should he sell? Luke, consulted by telephone, bade him hold on. He had an investment and not a speculation. Theophilus thought of the easily made thousands he could put into safe and solid War Loan, and of the re-invested dividends that would bring in what he vaguely thought of as compound interest. So, one morning, after a sleepless night, scared to insomnia by Fortune, he instructed his friendly bank manager to sell.

And, lo and behold, the very day after his enormous profits were assured, the shares in Consolidated Gonzagas fell several points. Day after day they dropped with the accelerated speed of a hurtling avalanche. Luke telephoned a frantic message. “Sell for God’s sake for what you can get.” He replied, with a pardonable glow of exultation, that he had sold at the top of the market, and, in a mad spirit of generosity, asked Luke to lunch with him at the vast semi-political caravanserai which was his club, and where he lunched modestly every day of his official life. Luke accepted. His genuine affection for Theophilus was due to some kink in a queer character. Daphne, the child of his adoration, encouraged the sentiment. With the impatient cruelty of youth, she called Evelina “The Blight,” and taught her father to look at Theophilus as a sort of withered and unflowering hollyhock.

Theophilus, still regarding Luke as Allah, but promoting himself to the position of His Prophet, departed from his usual procedure of hospitality, which consisted in putting the bill of fare before his guest and asking him what he would like (whereupon the latter would modestly choose roast mutton or minced veal with poached egg), and enjoined upon the steward to serve the most sumptuous meal the club could compass.

“Oysters, sir?”

“Of course. And ortolans?” said Theophilus, with a vague memory of a novel—possibly one of Ouida’s—which he had read in his youth, wherein ortolans as an article of diet had impressed him with an idea of Lucullan luxury.

The steward, who had no notion whether the thing was a fish, fowl or beast, replied gravely:

“I’m sorry, sir, they’re not in season.”

“That’s a pity,” said Theophilus with equal gravity.

“How about a nice sole with white wine sauce, and cutlets réforme and chocolate soufflé?”

“Excellent,” said Theophilus. “I leave it to you.”

Theophilus, deeming the unimaginative author of this dull meal an expert in banquetry, went away perfectly satisfied. Indeed, he had more imagination than the steward, for the white wine sauce (which, in the world’s most famous restaurants, is, at the best, but a sticky mess artfully employed to disguise staleness of fish) appealed to him as something new and exotic that would evoke the enthusiasm of his luxurious guest.

Luke came. When Theophilus suggested that they should go in at once to lunch, he demanded a cocktail. Theophilus led him into the crowded smoking-room. He summoned a waiter.

“A cocktail, please.”

“What kind, sir?”

“Is there more than one kind?”

Luke interrupted. “A dry Martini. Listen. Just be careful and give the order properly. Three-quarters gin and one French vermouth, instead of two-thirds and one-third—three-quarters and one-quarter, see?”

“Yes, sir. Only one?”

“You’ll excuse me,” said Theophilus. “But I’ve only had a cocktail once in my life, and then I didn’t like it.”

“Oh, God, man, do be human,” cried Luke. “Waiter, bring two. If Mr. Bird doesn’t want it, I’ll drink it.” He turned to Theophilus. “Damn it all. I need it. I’ve had a hell of a morning. I thought I knew a thing or two, but I’ve been simply done down by those Gonzaga swine. Without knowing it, you’re one of them.”

“My dear fellow,” Theophilus protested, “I never heard of the things until you told me of them.”

“Of course I know that,” said Luke, “but who gave you the tip to sell? You couldn’t have done it on your own.”

Behind Luke’s round hawk eyes even so ingenuous an observer as Theophilus could perceive the conjectured shadow of some Machiavelli-Mephistophelean enemy.

“I assure you I sold on my own initiative. The price seemed too good to be true.”

“Cold feet?” said Luke.

“If you like to put it that way—yes.”

“Now I remember,” said Luke, draining his cocktail which the waiter had just brought. “You’ve done the same thing—though not on so big a scale—once or twice before. Your infernal feet seem to be like a minimum registering thermometer. I’m not quite sure that they wouldn’t be worth three or four thousand a year to me.”

They went into lunch. Luke swallowed the oysters, picked at the yellow mess of fish, ate half a cutlet, and waved away the chocolate soufflé. He would hear nothing of Theophilus’s suggestion of champagne, and demanded plain water from the tap. He had a Board Meeting of sharks at 2.30, and it behoved him to meet them with the shark’s clear and unalcoholized intelligence. The cocktail he needed for his nerve’s sake. For that he was grateful to Theophilus.

“Thank your stars,” said he, “you can sit in a comfortable Government Office, preventing people—chiefly people like me—from doing things. All you have to do is to put a minute in your most characteristic university handwriting at the foot of a blue foolscap pile which represents the thought and labour of years. ‘Scheme unnecessary and wasteful, T.B.,’ and the thing’s damned for ever. If I could only be a professional damner instead of a creator, I should be a happier man.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Theophilus, who, not encouraged by his guest to stray into unfamiliar vineyards, had sipped his customary ginger-ale.

“Everything’s wrong. The ordinary investor’s wrong. The City is wrong. The country is wrong. The beastly universe is wrong. And the infernal part of it is that I seem to be wrong too!”

He leaned across the table, chin on elbow-supported hands, and the corners of his thin, lawyer-like lips curled into a wry smile.

“I’ve been right most of my life. That’s why I’ve been able to live like a rich man. I had nothing to start with, as you know. Practically all the family money went to that silly old ass of a woman in Hertfordshire. She’s dropsical with money. God knows what she’s worth. When she dies, I suppose I’ll come into it; but meanwhile . . . you know all about it. If my father and Evelina’s father hadn’t been God’s worst fools, she and I would have been born very well off. But they practically told the old man, my grandfather, to go to the devil. I don’t blame ’em, for he was the filthiest old swine ever miscreated. Aunt Fanny, to whom he left his money, isn’t much better. As a family the Waverings are a rotten lot. . . . Anyhow, I’ve had to fend for myself most of my life. Without scholarships I couldn’t have gone up to the University. I’ve lived by my wits ever since, and I’ve done pretty well. Five and forty, big house, cars, the beginnings of a racing stable, a future of ease. And now comes this infernal knock. It’s damnable. I think I will have an old brandy and a cigar.”

“We’ll go to the smoking-room.”

Theophilus paid his bill at the desk. Before giving the order to the waiter in the smoking-room, Theophilus asked:

“What kind of brandy would you like?”

Luke waved an impatient hand.

“There’s only one brandy worth drinking anywhere, and that’s the best they’ve got. Yes, I’ll have a cigar.”

He took one from the proffered box, and lit it.

“You lift a weight off my mind by saying that no one suggested your selling. That’s why—pardon my frankness, my dear old chap—I was so keen to come and lunch with you. You’re quite sure no one gave you a suggestion? Not Daventry?”

“Daventry?” Theophilus queried.

“Of course—Daventry. My partner. You’ve met him at my house. Pretty wife—Mona Daventry. There’s a bust-up there just at present; but that’s nothing to do with the matter.”

Theophilus vaguely remembered them. Evelina and himself had agreed that they were dreadful people, beyond the pale of intellectual folk. Mona Daventry, however, he liked. . . . He denied converse with Daventry, and repeated his assurance that the coldness of his feet alone had guided him along the warm path of prudence.

“It was most important for me to know,” said Luke. “There’s nothing more to be said.”

They talked of indifferent things. Presently Luke remarked:

“It’s a pity Daphne and Evelina don’t hit it off.”

“I think, my dear fellow,” said Theophilus, “Daphne was a bit—what shall we call it?—inconsiderate, that night at our house. Evelina’s a woman of some distinction, you’ll allow, and Daphne—though I know how you worship her—is, after all, only a chit of a girl. . . . I’m more than sorry there’s this breach. I’m ready to make allowances for nerves and that sort of thing; but it was all Daphne’s fault, wasn’t it?”

Luke leaned back in his chair and puffed his cigar. “I suppose it was, old chap. Daphne’s my only problem outside that accursed City. She has run me, and everything that is me, outside mere business, since she was three years old when her mother died. . . . I’ve brought her up badly I suppose. . . . Yes, even from her own account, she must have been abominably rude to Evelina. I would apologize for her if I thought it would be of any use. But it wouldn’t.”

“If she came to Evelina, and said she was sorry, I think all might be well.”

“But she won’t,” said Luke; “I’ve tried to persuade her.” He sniffed and tasted his brandy, and nodded to Theophilus. “Quite good. Has it ever occurred to you what a simplified world it would be if there weren’t any women in it?”

“It would be simplified to the extinction of the race,” said Theophilus unhumorously.

Luke laughed. “I’ve often wondered what you knew about women. Or, to put it better—about Woman. I know you’re perfectly happy with Evelina. But anyhow—enfin—there’s a lot else to it. . . .”

Theophilus, who, by way of the courtesies of hospitality, had allowed himself to be tempted by the Club’s oldest brandy and an excellent cigar, and was enjoying a new sensation of post-prandial mellowness, chuckled wickedly.

“Well, there was a very pretty little girl in a confectioner’s shop at Cambridge. I think I gave her a locket.”

“And what happened?”

“Oh nothing—nothing serious, of course. Another fellow came along and gave her a bracelet. She was a jolly pretty girl, though. . . .”

“You must have been a devil of a fellow at Cambridge,” said Luke. He looked at his watch and finished his brandy.

“I must go to my Board Meeting. Thanks for lunch. If I sent my love to Evelina she’d throw it out of window, so I won’t this time.”

Theophilus accompanied him to the Club door and saw him drive away in a magnificent car. He did not envy him the possession. Had he one he would find it an embarrassment and an offence. A Principal Clerk could not drive up to the office in such a vehicle, with anything like becoming modesty; and Evelina certainly would not show herself in it anywhere within the Borough of Greenwich. But it was pleasant to reflect that, should he desire such a one, he could take a bus to a motor shop and buy it on the spot.

A quarter of an hour afterwards he was agreeably absorbed in the minutiæ of the application of the Factory Acts. At five o’clock he varied his usual habits by looking in at a Strand tea-shop to meet, by appointment, Evelina, who, having a day off from municipal affairs, had come up to town to attend a lecture on the Economic Disposal of House Refuse. He found her as much aglow with the treat as a child after a pantomime, and, her enthusiasm evoked by the fairy tale of hygiene precluding any interest in his day’s doings, he considered it unnecessary to inform her of his meeting with Luke. Perhaps he would not have done so in any case. Already he had begun to be a miser in exotic sensations.

They spent together their dull and amicable evening in their uninspiring home, both, in their peculiar ways, claiming nothing more from life. As a woman she was quite content with Theophilus. He was a gentleman, an intellectual man and a theoretic social reformer, who therefore sympathized with her practical work. He was both strong and decisive. But, feeling herself to be several shades stronger and more decisive, she liked him enormously. Now and then they discussed what would have happened had they been blessed with offspring. She confessed that children would have been inconveniently in the way. A high birth-rate was, beyond question, a sign of a country’s prosperity; but the intelligentsia must have the privilege of promoting it vicariously. She could do much more good by inducing a hundred other women to bear children in hygienic surroundings than by bringing into the world an unconsidered unit or two of her own. So Evelina was happy. As a matter of fact, she didn’t like small children. The intimacies of any friend’s nursery were antipathetic. Her instinctive dislike of babies was as strong as her instinctive dislike of dogs. Babies were messy and maddeningly egotistic. Dogs she could subject to a rational criticism of their uselessness. Babies she had to explain away as best she could. She sincerely thanked Heaven that Theophilus hadn’t the bump of philoprogenitiveness.

He, good man, took Evelina for granted, as the female portion allotted to him by Destiny. She had never been a revelation, still less a mystery, although now and then she was a confounded puzzle; and it had never occurred to him to ask himself what on earth she represented in his man’s life. Yet he was perfectly contented with her as his daily companion, and was proud of her as a woman of public note. She had Parliamentary ambitions which he gravely fostered. Her name had been long since set down on lists of the Party Organization, and she only awaited the suggestion of a reasonable constituency. Now and then a Member of Parliament, meeting him in the club, would make a complimentary reference to his wife, and express the hope that she would stand at the next election. Whereby Theophilus felt agreeably flattered.

They spent their evening therefore mutually content. Florence, being in, had attended to the fires. They had changed into polite raiment. She wore a faded mauve combination of tea-gown and kimono with a deep yellow Mechlin lace collar which one of her family had given or bequeathed to her years ago. Her cropped hair was fairly tidy, her sallow face clean. Had she been attired, not in devastating hues, but in harmonious coloury, she might have been an attractive, even, in the eyes of affection, an alluring woman. But when a woman consciously scorns all the arts of allurement and unconsciously defeats Nature, she sits for a whole evening two yards away from a young husband who can find nothing more exciting to talk about than the continued iniquity of political nepotism in Government departments, and the bearing of the Factory Acts on the hygienic disposal of household refuse.

It was only when they had risen preparatory to retiring for the night that Evelina remembered a letter she had received from the Rich Aunt in Hertfordshire.

“She tells me that Mona Daventry is divorcing her husband.”

“That’s Luke’s partner, isn’t it?” asked Theophilus, feeling diabolically astute.

“Yes. We’ve met them at Cedar Hall two or three times. She’s a fluffy-haired, empty-headed dumpling of a woman, and he’s a hideous little dark pig of a man.”

Theophilus nodded. “I can’t say I blame her. A dreadful fellow.”

“To me both of them are merely animals,” said Evelina. “But he seems to be the worse of the two. . . . I only tell you for what it’s worth. . . . I never could understand Luke mixing himself up with such horrible people. After all, socially Luke’s a gentleman, however rotten he may be in his business affairs.”

“My dear,” said Theophilus, with mildly uplifted hand, “you’re always saying things like that about Luke. How do you know?”

“First I feel it in my bones—and that ought to be good enough. And then his name is mud in the City. Only yesterday John Roberts and I were talking over the general financial situation in the country, and he told me that many big concerns in the City were on the shoals—he’s a stockbroker, and of course knows what he’s talking about—and among others mentioned ‘The British and Overseas Trust.’ ”

“The deuce he did!” exclaimed Theophilus. “That’s Luke.”

“I know. Of course I didn’t proclaim Luke as my cousin. But that bears out what I’ve always thought of him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me last night, my dear?”

She made a wearied gesture. “It slipped my mind. I had more interesting things to think of. Anyhow, keep clear of Luke.”

Theophilus smiled.

“Financially clear, yes. I promise.”

They kissed perfunctorily and parted. He turned out the drawing-room lights and went into his cheerless library, where he found his current bottle of Vichy water and a tumbler set out on a chipped lacquered tray. Conscious of need of warmer comfort, he searched the dining-room for whisky. The decanter from which he had entertained Luke hospitably a month before, and since not touched, was empty. He was certain of its fullness when he had brought it in to Luke, and their potations had been almost of a symbolic character. He registered a vow, as he had registered many such others—all written in water—to inform Evelina of cynical domestic turpitude, and cheerfully bore away with him from the sideboard the remains of the Australian Burgundy left from dinner. Half a tumbler of this fluid by his side, and between his lips a cigarette drawn from a paper packet—Lucky Camels or Dromedary Strikes; his habit was to enter a tobacconist’s and ask for a packet of cigarettes and take whatever the smart young man behind the counter slapped before him—he gave himself up to rumination over the extraordinary events of the day.

The most extraordinary phenomenon was the co-ordination of Evelina’s report on the British and Overseas Trust Limited with the nervous talk and behaviour of the ordinarily serene and a trifle supercilious Luke.

He himself had cleared a small fortune of some twenty thousand pounds. With that which he had already made, his estate was now thirty-five thousand, bringing him in seventeen hundred and fifty a year—subject, of course, to income tax—more than twice his salary, and bringing him in more and more every year, seeing that he had instructed his bankers to reinvest every dividend. And he owed it all to Luke, kindly, altruistic Luke, who had never—as far as his search into dark motive could surmise—been the richer for him by one penny-piece. By the time he had finished his modest, though perhaps unseasonable, draught of Burgundy, he glowed in defence of his benefactor. He did not realize that the operations of the British and Overseas Trust Limited and other cognate companies were pregnant with disaster to many thousands of his fellow-citizens.

CHAPTER III

T

HE 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.