Decline and Fall

waits upon even the most lurid of nightmares. Here were sweet corn and pimentoes, and white Burgundy, and the grave eyes of Arthur Potts, and there on the peg over his head hung the black hat he had bought in St. James’s that afternoon. For an evening at least the shadow that has flitted about this narrative under the name of Paul Pennyfeather materialized into the solid figure of an intelligent, well-educated, well-conducted young man, a man who could be trusted to use his vote at a general election with discretion and proper detachment, whose opinion on a ballet or a critical essay was rather better than most people’s, who could order a dinner without embarrassment and in a creditable French accent, who could be trusted to see to luggage at foreign railway-stations, and might be expected to acquit himself with decision and decorum in all the emergencies of civilized life. This was the Paul Pennyfeather who had been developing in the placid years which preceded this story. In fact, the whole of this book is really an account of the mysterious disappearance of Paul Pennyfeather, so that readers must not complain if the shadow which took his name does not amply fill the important part of hero for which he was originally cast.

“I saw some of Otto Silenus’s work at Munich,” said Potts. “I think that he’s a man worth watching. He was in Moscow at one time and in the Bauhaus at Dessau. He can’t be more than twenty-five now. There were some photographs of King’s Thursday in a paper the other day. It looked extraordinarily interesting. It’s said to be the only really imaginative building since the French Revolution. He’s got right away from Corbusier, anyway.”

“If people only realized,” said Paul, “Corbusier is a pure nineteenth-century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that’s why they like him.”

Then Paul told Potts about the death of Grimes and the doubts of Mr. Prendergast, and Potts told Paul about rather an interesting job he had got under the League of Nations and how he had decided not to take his Schools in consequence and of the unenlightened attitude adopted in the matter by Potts’s father.

For an evening Paul became a real person again, but next day he woke up leaving himself disembodied somewhere between Sloane Square and Onslow Square. He had to meet Beste-Chetwynde and catch a morning train to King’s Thursday, and there his extraordinary adventures began anew. From the point of view of this story Paul’s second disappearance is necessary, because, as the reader will probably have discerned already, Paul Pennyfeather would never have made a hero, and the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness.

III

Pervigilium Veneris

“I’m looking forward to seeing our new house,” said Beste-Chetwynde as they drove out from the station. “Mamma says it may be rather a surprise.”

The lodges and gates had been left undisturbed, and the lodge-keeper’s wife, white-aproned as Mrs. Noah, bobbed at the car as it turned into the avenue. The temperate April sunlight fell through the budding chestnuts and revealed between their trunks green glimpses of parkland and the distant radiance of a lake. “English spring,” thought Paul. “In the dreaming ancestral beauty of the English country.” Surely, he thought, these great chestnuts in the morning sun stood for something enduring and serene in a world that had lost its reason and would so stand when the chaos and confusion were forgotten? And surely it was the spirit of William Morris that whispered to him in Margot Beste-Chetwynde’s motorcar about seedtime and harvest, the superb succession of the seasons, the harmonious interdependence of rich and poor, of dignity, innocence, and tradition? But at a turn in the drive the cadence of his thoughts was abruptly transected. They had come into sight of the house.

“Golly!” said Beste-Chetwynde. “Mamma has done herself proud this time.”

The car stopped. Paul and Beste-Chetwynde got out, stretched themselves, and were led across a floor of bottle-green glass into the dining-room, where Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde was already seated at the vulcanite table beginning her luncheon.

“My dears,” she cried, extending a hand to each of them, “how divine to see you! I have been waiting for this to go straight to bed.”

She was a thousand times more beautiful than all Paul’s feverish recollections of her. He watched her, transported.

“Darling boy, how are you?” she said. “Do you know, you’re beginning to look rather lovely in a coltish kind of way. Don’t you think so, Otto?”

Paul had noticed nothing in the room except Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde; he now saw that there was a young man sitting beside her, with very fair hair and large glasses, behind which his eyes lay like slim fish in an aquarium; they woke from their slumber, flashed iridescent in the light, and darted towards little Beste-Chetwynde.

“His head is too big, and his hands are too small,” said Professor Silenus. “But his skin is pretty.”

“How would it be if I made Mr. Pennyfeather a cocktail?” Beste-Chetwynde asked.

“Yes, Peter, dear, do. He makes them rather well. You can’t think what a week I’ve had, moving in and taking the neighbours round the house and the Press photographers. Otto’s house doesn’t seem to be a great success with the county, does it, Otto? What was it Lady Vanbrugh said?”

“Was that the woman like Napoleon the Great?”

“Yes, darling.”

“She said she understood that the drains were satisfactory, but that, of course, they were underground. I asked her if she wished to make use of them, and said that I did, and went away. But, as a matter of fact, she was quite right. They are the only tolerable part of the house. How glad I shall be when the mosaics are finished and I can go!”

“Don’t you like it?” asked Peter Beste-Chetwynde over the cocktail-shaker. “I think it’s so good. It was rather Chokey’s taste before.”

“I hate and detest every bit of it,” said Professor Silenus gravely. “Nothing I have