The Kingdom of Theophilus

CHAPTER IT 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*****e 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.