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 reign1 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 remarkable2 house.
It was called King's Thursday, and stood on the place which since the reign of Bloody3 Mary had been the seat of the Earls of Pastmaster. For three centuries the poverty and inertia4 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 portico5, fa?ade, terrace, orangery, tower, or battlement marred6 its timbered front. In the craze for coal gas and indoor sanitation7, King's Thursday had slept unscathed by plumber8 or engineer. The estate carpenter, an office hereditary9 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 fabric10, 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 flickered11 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 blot12 on the progressive county, King's Thursday gradually became the Mecca of week end parties. 'I thought we might go over to tea at the Pastmasters',' hostesses would say after luncheon13 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 imprisoned14 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 motor cars to their modernized15 manors17, 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 leisurely19, prosaic20 life of the English Renaissance21, and how they had talked at tea of field sports and the reform of the Prayer Book 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 aromatic22 merchandise of some Hanse ghetto23.
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 unduly24 extravagant25 establishment, and it was scarcely possible to live there with fewer. But servants, the Beste Chetwyndes found, were less responsive thar their masters to the charms of Tudor simplicity26; the bedrooms originally ordained27 for them among the maze28 of rafters that supported the arches of uneven29 stone roofs 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 recurring30 strain of trotting31 in the bleak32 hour before breakfast up and down the narrow servants' staircases and along the interminable passages with jugs33 of warm water for the morning baths. Modern democracy called for lifts and labour saving devices, for hot water taps and cold water taps and (horrible innovation!) drinking water taps, for gas rings, and electric ovens.
With rather less reluctance34 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 shutters35 and semi tropical vegetation of a villa36 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 consternation37 was felt, not only in the Great Houses, but in the bungalows38 and the villas39 for miles about, while in the neighbouring rectories antiquarian clergymen devised folk tales of the disasters that should come to crops and herds40 when there was no longer a Beste-Chetwynde at King's Thursday. Mr Jack41 Spire42 in the London Hercules wrote eloquently43 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-Chetwunde, the motto carved over the chimneypiece in the great hall, was quoted exultantly44 on all sides, for very little was known about Margot Beste Chetwynde in Hampshire, and the illustrated45 papers were always pleased to take any occasion to embellish46 their pages with her latest portrait; the reporter to whom she remarked, 'I can't think of anything more bourgeois47 and awful than timbered Tudor architecture,' did not take in what she meant or include the statement in his 'story'.
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 allied48 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, how many years ago, the romantic young heiress who had walked entranced among the cut yews49, and had been wooed, how phlegmatically50, 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 demolition51 proceeded, with the aid of all that was most pulverizing52 in modern machinery53, became increasingly enraged54, and, in their eagerness to preserve for the county a little of the great manor16, even resorted to predatory expeditions, from which they would return with lumps of carved stonework for their rock gardens, until the contractors55 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 admiration56 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 produced in a progressive Hungarian quarterly. His only other completed work was the décor for a cinema film of great length and complexity57 of plot a complexity rendered the more inextricable by the producer's austere58 elimination59 of all human characters, a fact which had proved fatal to its commercial success. He was starving resignedly in a bedsitting 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 aesthetic60 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 ferro concrete and aluminium61, '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 in Law Mansion62 Builder 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 munch63.
'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 immature64, self-destructive, antiquated65 mischief66 is man! How obscure and gross his prancing67 and chattering68 on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome69 and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self approval of his biological by-product70! this half formed, ill conditioned body! this erratic71, maladjusted mechanism72 of his soul: on one side the harmonious73 instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible74 purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile18 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 fixed75 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 jaws76 champed rhythmically77; otherwise he was wholly immobile .
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reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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inertia
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| adj.惰性，惯性，懒惰，迟钝 | |
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portico
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| n.柱廊，门廊 | |
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marred
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| adj. 被损毁, 污损的 | |
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sanitation
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| n.公共卫生，环境卫生，卫生设备 | |
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plumber
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| n.(装修水管的)管子工 | |
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hereditary
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| adj.遗传的，遗传性的，可继承的，世袭的 | |
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fabric
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| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
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flickered
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| （通常指灯光）闪烁，摇曳( flicker的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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12
blot
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| vt.弄脏（用吸墨纸）吸干；n.污点，污渍 | |
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luncheon
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| n.午宴，午餐，便宴 | |
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imprisoned
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| 下狱，监禁( imprison的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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modernized
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| 使现代化，使适应现代需要( modernize的过去式和过去分词 )； 现代化，使用现代方法 | |
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manor
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| n.庄园，领地 | |
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manors
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| n.庄园（manor的复数形式） | |
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vile
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| adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的 | |
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leisurely
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| adj.悠闲的；从容的，慢慢的 | |
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prosaic
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| adj.单调的，无趣的 | |
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renaissance
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| n.复活，复兴，文艺复兴 | |
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aromatic
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| adj.芳香的，有香味的 | |
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ghetto
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| n.少数民族聚居区，贫民区 | |
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unduly
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| adv.过度地，不适当地 | |
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extravagant
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| adj.奢侈的；过分的；(言行等)放肆的 | |
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simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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ordained
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| v.任命（某人）为牧师( ordain的过去式和过去分词 )；授予（某人）圣职；（上帝、法律等）命令；判定 | |
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maze
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| n.迷宫，八阵图，混乱，迷惑 | |
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uneven
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| adj.不平坦的，不规则的，不均匀的 | |
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recurring
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| adj.往复的，再次发生的 | |
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trotting
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| 小跑，急走( trot的现在分词 )； 匆匆忙忙地走 | |
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bleak
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| adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的 | |
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jugs
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| （有柄及小口的）水壶( jug的名词复数 ) | |
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reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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shutters
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| 百叶窗( shutter的名词复数 )； （照相机的）快门 | |
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villa
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| n.别墅，城郊小屋 | |
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consternation
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| n.大为吃惊，惊骇 | |
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bungalows
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| n.平房( bungalow的名词复数 )；单层小屋，多于一层的小屋 | |
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villas
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| 别墅，公馆( villa的名词复数 )； （城郊）住宅 | |
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herds
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| 兽群( herd的名词复数 )； 牧群； 人群； 群众 | |
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41
jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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spire
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| n.(教堂)尖顶，尖塔，高点 | |
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eloquently
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| adv. 雄辩地(有口才地, 富于表情地) | |
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exultantly
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| adv.狂欢地，欢欣鼓舞地 | |
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illustrated
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| adj. 有插图的，列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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embellish
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| v.装饰，布置；给…添加细节，润饰 | |
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bourgeois
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| adj./n.追求物质享受的(人)；中产阶级分子 | |
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allied
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| adj.协约国的；同盟国的 | |
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yews
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| n.紫杉( yew的名词复数 ) | |
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phlegmatically
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demolition
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| n.破坏,毁坏,毁坏之遗迹 | |
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pulverizing
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| v.将…弄碎( pulverize的现在分词 )；将…弄成粉末或尘埃；摧毁；粉碎 | |
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53
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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enraged
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| 使暴怒( enrage的过去式和过去分词 )； 歜； 激愤 | |
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contractors
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| n.（建筑、监造中的）承包人( contractor的名词复数 ) | |
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56
admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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57
complexity
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| n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物 | |
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austere
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| adj.艰苦的；朴素的，朴实无华的；严峻的 | |
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elimination
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| n.排除，消除，消灭 | |
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aesthetic
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| adj.美学的，审美的，有美感 | |
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61
aluminium
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| n.铝 (=aluminum) | |
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mansion
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| n.大厦，大楼；宅第 | |
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munch
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| v.用力嚼，大声咀嚼 | |
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immature
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| adj.未成熟的，发育未全的，未充分发展的 | |
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antiquated
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| adj.陈旧的，过时的 | |
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mischief
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| n.损害，伤害，危害；恶作剧，捣蛋，胡闹 | |
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prancing
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| v.（马）腾跃( prance的现在分词 ) | |
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chattering
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| n. （机器振动发出的）咔嗒声，(鸟等)鸣，啁啾 adj. 喋喋不休的，啾啾声的 动词chatter的现在分词形式 | |
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loathsome
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| adj.讨厌的，令人厌恶的 | |
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by-product
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| n.副产品，附带产生的结果 | |
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71
erratic
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| adj.古怪的，反复无常的，不稳定的 | |
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mechanism
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| n.机械装置；机构，结构 | |
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harmonious
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| adj.和睦的，调和的，和谐的，协调的 | |
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inflexible
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| adj.不可改变的，不受影响的，不屈服的 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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76
jaws
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| n.口部；嘴 | |
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rhythmically
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| adv.有节奏地 | |
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