The Kingdom of Theophilus

CHAPTER II-2

“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.