The Kingdom of Theophilus

CHAPTER I-2

“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 s*x, 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.”