The Kingdom of Theophilus

CHAPTER I-3

“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.”