King’s Thursday had been empty for two years when Margot Beste-Chetwynde bought it. She had been there once before, during her engagement.
“It’s worse than I thought, far worse,” she said as she drove up the main avenue which the loyal villagers had decorated with the flags of the sometime allied nations in honour of her arrival. “Liberty’s new building cannot be compared with it,” she said, and stirred impatiently in the car, as she remembered, many years ago, the romantic young heiress who had walked entranced among the cut yews, and had been wooed, how phlegmatically, in the odour of honeysuckle.
Mr. Jack Spire was busily saving St. Sepulchre’s, Egg Street (where Dr. Johnson is said once to have attended Matins), when Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s decision to rebuild King’s Thursday became public. He said, very seriously: “Well, we did what we could,” and thought no more about it.
Not so the neighbours, who as the work of demolition proceeded, with the aid of all that was most pulverizing in modern machinery, became increasingly enraged, and, in their eagerness to preserve for the county a little of the great manor, even resorted to predatory expeditions, from which they would return with lumps of carved stonework for their rock-gardens, until the contractors were forced to maintain an extra watchman at night. The panelling went to South Kensington, where it has come in for a great deal of admiration from the Indian students. Within nine months of Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde’s taking possession the new architect was at work on his plans.
It was Otto Friedrich Silenus’s first important commission. “Something clean and square,” had been Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde’s instructions, and then she had disappeared on one of her mysterious world-tours, saying as she left: “Please see that it is finished by the spring.”
Professor Silenus—for that was the title by which this extraordinary young man chose to be called—was a “find” of Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde’s. He was not yet very famous anywhere, though all who met him carried away deep and diverse impressions of his genius. He had first attracted Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde’s attention with the rejected design for a chewing-gum factory which had been reproduced in a progressive Hungarian quarterly. His only other completed work was the décor for a cinema-film of great length and complexity of plot—a complexity rendered the more inextricable by the producer’s austere elimination of all human characters, a fact which had proved fatal to its commercial success. He was starving resignedly in a bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury, despite the untiring efforts of his parents to find him—they were very rich in Hamburg—when he was offered the commission of rebuilding King’s Thursday. “Something clean and square”—he pondered for three hungry days upon the aesthetic implications of these instructions, and then began his designs.
“The problem of architecture as I see it,” he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of ferroconcrete and aluminium, “is the problem of all art—the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,” he said gloomily; “please tell your readers that. Man is never beautiful, he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.”
The journalist looked doubtful. “Now, Professor,” he said, “tell me this. Is it a fact that you have refused to take any fee for the work you are doing, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“It is not,” said Professor Silenus.
“Peer’s Sister’s-in-Law Mansion Builder refuses fee on Future of Architecture,” thought the journalist happily. “Will machines live in houses? Amazing forecast of Professor-Architect.”
Professor Silenus watched the reporter disappear down the drive and then, taking a biscuit from his pocket, began to munch.
“I suppose there ought to be a staircase,” he said gloomily. “Why can’t the creatures stay in one place? Up and down, in and out, round and round! Why can’t they sit still and work? Do dynamos require staircases? Do monkeys require houses? What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of this biological byproduct! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!”
Two hours later the foreman in charge of the concrete-mixer came to consult with the Professor. He had not moved from where the journalist had left him; his fawn-like eyes were fixed and inexpressive, and the hand which had held the biscuit still rose and fell to and from his mouth with a regular motion, while his empty jaws champed rhythmically, otherwise he was wholly immobile.
II
Interlude in Belgravia
Arthur Potts knew all about King’s Thursday and Professor Silenus.
On the day of Paul’s arrival in London he rang up his old friend and arranged to dine with him at the Queen’s Restaurant in Sloane Square. It seemed quite natural that they should be again seated at the table where they had discussed so many subjects of public importance, Budgets and birth control and Byzantine mosaics. For the first time since the disturbing evening of the Bollinger dinner he felt at ease. Llanabba Castle, with its sham castellations and preposterous inhabitants, had sunk into the oblivion that
