'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 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.
CHAPTER 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 motor car about seed‑time 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.