I
King’s Thursday
Margot Beste-Chetwynde had two houses in England—one in London and the other in Hampshire. Her London house, built in the reign of William and Mary, was, by universal consent, the most beautiful building between Bond Street and Park Lane, but opinion was divided on the subject of her country house. This was very new indeed, in fact, it was scarcely finished when Paul went to stay there at the beginning of the Easter holidays. No single act in Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde’s eventful and in many ways disgraceful career had excited quite so much hostile comment as the building, or rather the rebuilding, of this remarkable house.
It was called King’s Thursday, and stood on the place which since the reign of Bloody Mary had been the seat of the Earls of Pastmaster. For three centuries the poverty and inertia of this noble family had preserved its home unmodified by any of the succeeding fashions that fell upon domestic architecture. No wing had been added, no window filled in; no portico, façade, terrace, orangery, tower or battlement marred its timbered front. In the craze for coal-gas and indoor sanitation, King’s Thursday had slept unscathed by plumber or engineer. The estate-carpenter, an office hereditary in the family of the original joiner who had panelled the halls and carved the great staircase, did such restorations as became necessary from time to time for the maintenance of the fabric, working with the same tools and with the traditional methods, so that in a few years his work became indistinguishable from that of his grandsires. Rushlights still flickered in the bedrooms long after all Lord Pastmaster’s neighbours were blazing away electricity, and in the last fifty years Hampshire had gradually become proud of King’s Thursday. From having been considered rather a blot on the progressive county, King’s Thursday gradually became the Mecca of weekend parties. “I thought we might go over to tea at the Pastmasters’,” hostesses would say after luncheon on Sundays. “You really must see their house. Quite unspoilt, my dear. Professor Franks, who was here last week, said it was recognized as the finest piece of domestic Tudor in England.”
It was impossible to ring the Pastmasters up, but they were always at home and unaffectedly delighted to see their neighbours, and after tea Lord Pastmaster would lead the newcomers on a tour round the house, along the great galleries and into the bedrooms, and would point out the priest-hole and the closet where the third Earl imprisoned his wife for wishing to rebuild a smoking chimney. “That chimney still smokes when the wind’s in the east,” he would say, “but we haven’t rebuilt it yet.”
Later they would drive away in their big motorcars to their modernized manors, and as they sat in their hot baths before dinner the more impressionable visitors might reflect how they seemed to have been privileged to step for an hour and a half out of their own century into the leisurely, prosaic life of the English Renaissance, and how they had talked at tea of field-sports and the reform of the Prayerbook just as the very-great-grandparents of their host might have talked in the same chairs and before the same fire three hundred years before, when their own ancestors, perhaps, slept on straw or among the aromatic merchandize of some Hanse ghetto.
But the time came when King’s Thursday had to be sold. It had been built in an age when twenty servants were not an unduly extravagant establishment, and it was scarcely possible to live there with fewer. But servants, the Beste-Chetwyndes found, were less responsive than their masters to the charms of Tudor simplicity; the bedrooms originally ordained for them among the maze of rafters that supported the arches of uneven stone roof were unsuited to modern requirements, and only the dirtiest and most tipsy of cooks could be induced to inhabit the enormous stone-flagged kitchen or turn the spits at the open fire. Housemaids tended to melt away under the recurring strain of trotting in the bleak hour before breakfast up and down the narrow servants’ staircases and along the interminable passages with jugs of warm water for the morning baths. Modern democracy called for lifts and laboursaving devices, for hot-water taps and cold-water taps and (horrible invention!) drinking-water taps, for gas-rings and electric ovens.
With rather less reluctance than might have been expected, Lord Pastmaster made up his mind to sell the house; to tell the truth, he could never quite see what all the fuss was about; he supposed it was very historic, and all that, but his own taste lay towards the green shutters and semitropical vegetation of a villa on the French Riviera, in which, if his critics had only realized it, he was fulfilling the traditional character of his family far better than by struggling on at King’s Thursday. But the County was slow to observe this, and something very like consternation was felt, not only in the Great Houses, but in the bungalows and the villas for miles about, while in the neighbouring rectories antiquarian clergymen devised folktales of the disasters that should come to crops and herds when there was no longer a Beste-Chetwynde at King’s Thursday. Mr. Jack Spire in the London Hercules wrote eloquently on the “Save King’s Thursday Fund,” urging that it should be preserved for the nation, but only a very small amount was collected of the very large sum which Lord Pastmaster was sensible enough to demand, and the theory that it was to be transplanted and re-erected in Cincinnati found wide acceptance.
Thus the news that Lord Pastmaster’s rich sister-in-law had bought the family seat was received with the utmost delight by her new neighbours and by Mr. Jack Spire, and all sections of the London Press which noticed the sale. Teneat Bene Beste-Chetwynde, the motto carved over the chimneypiece in the great hall, was quoted exultantly on all sides, for very little was known about
