And never shall have, I said.
You cant say that, said Santonix. Born poor doesnt mean youve got to stay poor. Moneys queer. It goes where its wanted.
Im not sharp enough, I said.
Youre not ambitious enough. Ambition hasnt woken up in you, but its there, you know.
Oh, well, I said, some day when Ive woken up ambition and Ive made money, then Ill come to you and say build me a house.
He sighed then. He said:
I cant wait No, I cant afford to wait. Ive only a short time to go now. One house two houses more. Not more than that. One doesnt want to die young Sometimes one has to It doesnt really matter, I suppose. Ill have to wake up my ambition quick.
No, said Santonix. Youre healthy, youre having fun, dont change your way of life.
I said: I couldnt if I tried.
I thought that was true then. I liked my way of life and I was having fun and there was never anything wrong with my health. Ive driven a lot of people whove made money, whove worked hard and whove got ulcers and coronary thrombosis and many other things as a result of working hard. I didnt want to work hard. I could do a job as well as another but that was all there was to it. And I hadnt got ambition, or I didnt think I had ambition. Santonix had had ambition, I suppose. I could see that designing houses and building them, the planning of the drawing and something else that I couldnt quite get hold of, all that had taken it out of him. He hadnt been a strong man to begin with. I had a fanciful idea sometimes that he was killing himself before his time by the work he had put out to drive his ambition. I didnt want to work. It was as simple as that. I distrusted work, disliked it. I thought it was a very bad thing, that the human race had unfortunately invented for itself.
I thought about Santonix quite often. He intrigued me almost more than anyone I knew. One of the oddest things in life, I think, is the things one remembers. One chooses to remember, I suppose. Something in one must choose. Santonix and his house were one of the things and the picture in Bond Street and visiting that ruined house, The Towers, and hearing the story of Gipsys Acre, all those were the things that Id chosen to remember! Sometimes girls that I met, and journeys to the foreign places in the course of driving clients about. The clients were all the same. Dull. They always stayed at the same kind of hotels and ate the same kind of unimaginative food.
I still had that queer feeling in me of waiting for something, waiting for something to be offered to me, or to happen to me, I dont quite know which way describes it best. I suppose really I was looking for a girl, the right sort of girl by which I dont mean a nice, suitable girl to settle down with, which is what my mother would have meant or my Uncle Joshua or some of my friends. I didnt know at that time anything about love. All I knew about was sex. That was all anybody of my generation seemed to know about. We talked about it too much, I think, and heard too much about it and took it too seriously. We didnt know any of my friends or myself what it was really going to be when it happened. Love I mean. We were young and virile and we looked the girls over we met and we appreciated their curves and their legs and the kind of eye they gave you, and you thought to yourself: Will they or wont they? Should I be wasting my time? And the more girls you made the more you boasted and the finer fellow you were thought to be, and the finer fellow you thought yourself.
Id no real idea that that wasnt all there was to it. I suppose it happens to everyone sooner or later and it happens suddenly. You dont think as you imagine youre going to think: This might be the girl for me This is the girl who is going to be mine. At least, I didnt feel it that way. I didnt know that when it happened it would happen quite suddenly. That I would say: Thats the girl I belong to. Im hers. I belong to her, utterly, for always. No. I never dreamed it would be like that. Didnt one of the old comedians say once wasnt it one of his stock jokes[14]? Ive been in love once and if I felt it coming on again I tell you Id emigrate. It was the same with me. If I had known, if I had only known what it could all come to mean Id have emigrated too! If Id been wise, that is.
Chapter 4
I hadnt forgotten my plan of going to the auction.
There was three weeks to go. Id had two more trips to the Continent, one to France and the other to Germany. It was when I was in Hamburg that things came to a crisis. For one thing I took a violent dislike to the man and his wife I was driving. They represented everything I disliked most. They were rude, inconsiderate, unpleasant to look at, and I suppose they developed in me a feeling of being unable to stand this life of sycophancy any longer. I was careful, mind you. I thought I couldnt stand them another day but I didnt tell them so. No good running yourself in bad with the firm that employs you. So I telephoned up their hotel, said I was ill and I wired London saying the same thing. I said I might be in quarantine and it would be advisable if they sent out a driver to replace me. Nobody could blame me for that. They wouldnt care enough about me to make further inquiries and theyd merely think that I was too feverish to send them any more news. Later, Id turn up in London again, spinning them a yarn of how ill Id been[15]! But I didnt think I should do that. I was fed up with the driving racket[16].
That rebellion of mine was an important turning point in my life. Because of that and of other things, I turned up at the auction rooms on the appointed date.
Unless sold before by private treaty[17] had been pasted across the original board. But it was still there, so it hadnt been sold by private treaty. I was so excited I hardly knew what I was doing.
As I say, I had never been to a public auction of property before. I was imbued with the idea that it would be exciting but it wasnt exciting. Not in the least. It was one of the most moribund performances I have ever attended. It took place in a semi-gloomy atmosphere and there were only about six or seven people there. The auctioneer was quite different from those auctioneers that I had seen presiding at furniture sales or things of that kind; men with facetious voices and very hearty and full of jokes. This one, in a dead and alive voice, praised the property and described the acreage and a few things like that and then he went half-heartedly into the bidding. Somebody made a bid of £5,000. The auctioneer gave a tired smile rather as one who hears a joke that isnt really funny. He made a few remarks and there were a few more bids. They were mostly country types standing around. Someone who looked like a farmer, someone who I guessed to be one of the competitive builders, a couple of lawyers, I think, one a man who looked as though he was a stranger from London, well dressed and professional-looking. I dont know if he made an actual bid, he may have done. If so it was very quietly and done more by gesture. Anyway the bidding petered to an end, the auctioneer announced in a melancholy voice that the reserve price had not been reached and the thing broke up.
That was a dull business, I said to one of the countrylooking fellows whom I was next to as I went out.
Much the same as usual, he said. Been to many of these?
No, I said, actually its the first.
Come out of curiosity, did you? I didnt notice you doing any bidding.
No fear, I said. I just wanted to see how it would go.
Well, its the way it runs very often. They just want to see whos interested, you know.
I looked at him inquiringly.
Only three of em in it[18], I should say, said my friend. Whetherby from Helminster. Hes the builder, you know. Then Dakham and Coombe, bidding on behalf of some Liverpool firm, I understand, and a dark horse from London, too, I should say a lawyer. Of course there may be more in it than that, but those seemed the main ones to me. Itll go cheap. Thats what everyone says.
Because of the places reputation? I asked.
Oh, youve heard about Gipsys Acre, have you? Thats only what the country people say. Rural Council ought to have altered that road years ago its a death trap.
But the place has got a bad reputation?
I tell you thats just superstition. Anyway, as I say, the real businessll happen now behind the scenes, you know. Theyll go and make offers. Id say the Liverpool people might get it. I dont think Whetherbyll go high enough. He likes buying cheap. Plenty of properties coming into the market nowadays for development. After all, its not many people who could afford to buy the place, pull that ruined house down and put up another house there, could they?
Doesnt seem to happen very often nowadays, I said.
Too difficult. What with taxation and one thing and another, and you cant get domestic help in the country. No, people would rather pay thousands for a luxury flat in a town nowadays up on the sixteenth floor of a modern building. Big unwieldy country houses are a drag on the market.
But you could build a modern house, I argued. Labour-saving.
You could, but its an expensive business and people arent so fond of living lonely.
Some people might be, I said.
He laughed and we parted. I walked along, frowning, puzzling to myself. My feet took me without my really noticing where I was going along the road between the trees and up, up to the curving road that led between the trees to the moorlands.
And so I came to the spot in the road where I first saw Ellie. As I said, she was standing just by a tall fir tree and she had the look, if I can explain it, of someone who hadnt been there a moment before but had just materialized, as it were, out of the tree. She was wearing a sort of dark green tweed and her hair was the soft brown colour of an autumn leaf and there was something a bit unsubstantial about her. I saw her and I stopped. She was looking at me, her lips just parted, looking slightly startled. I suppose I looked startled too. I wanted to say something and I didnt quite know what to say. Then I said:
Sorry. I I didnt mean to startle you. I didnt know there was anyone here.
She said, and her voice was very soft and gentle, it might have been a little girls voice but not quite. She said:
Its quite all right. I mean, I didnt think anyone would be here either. She looked round her and said, It its a lonely spot. And she shivered just a little.
There was rather a chilly wind that afternoon. But perhaps it wasnt the wind. I dont know. I came a step or two nearer.
It is a sort of scary place rather, isnt it? I said. I mean, the house being a ruin the way it is.
The Towers, she said thoughtfully. That was the name of it, wasnt it only I mean, there dont seem to have been any towers.
I expect that was just a name, I said. People call their houses names like The Towers to make them sound grander than they are.
She laughed just a little. I suppose that was it, she said. This perhaps you know, Im not sure this is the place that theyre selling today or putting up for auction?
Yes, I said. Ive come from the auction now.
Oh. She sounded startled. Were you are you interested?
Im not likely to buy a ruined house with a few hundred acres of woodland land, I said. Im not in that class.
Was it sold? she asked.
No, it didnt come up to reserve[19].
Oh. I see. She sounded relieved.
You didnt want to buy it either, did you? I said.
Oh no, she said, of course not. She sounded nervous about it.
I hesitated and then I blurted out the words that came to my lips.
Im pretending, I said. I cant buy it, of course, because I havent got any money, but Im interested. Id like to buy it. I want to buy it. Open your mouth and laugh at me if you like but thats the way it is.
But isnt it rather too decrepit, too
Oh yes, I said. I dont mean I want it like it is now. I want to pull this down, cart it all away. Its an ugly house and I think it must have been a sad house. But this place isnt sad or ugly. Its beautiful. Look here. Come a little this way, through the trees. Look out at the view that way where it goes to the hills and the moors. Dyou see[20]? Clear away a vista here and then you come this way
I took her by the arm and led her to a second point of the compass. If we were behaving unconventionally she did not notice it. Anyway, it wasnt that kind of way I was holding her. I wanted to show her what I saw.
Here, I said, here you see where it sweeps down to the sea and where the rocks show out there. Theres a town between us and that but we cant see it because of the hills bulging out farther down the slope. And then you can look a third way, to a vague foresty valley. Do you see now if you cut down trees and make big vistas and clear this space round the house, do you see what a beautiful house you could have here? You wouldnt site it where the old one is. Youd go about fifty a hundred yards to the right, here. This is where you could have a house, a wonderful house. А house built by an architect whos a genius.
Do you know any architects who are geniuses? She sounded doubtful.
I know one, I said.
Then I started telling her about Santonix. We sat down side by side on a fallen tree and I talked. Yes, I talked to that slender woodland girl whom Id never seen before and I put all I had into what I was telling her. I told her the dream that one could build up.
It wont happen, I said, I know that. It couldnt happen. But think. Think into it just like Im thinking into it. There wed cut the trees and there wed open up, and wed plant things, rhododendrons and azaleas, and my friend Santonix would come. Hed cough a good deal because I think hes dying of consumption or something but he could do it. He could do it before he died. He could build the most wonderful house. You dont know what his houses are like. He builds them for very rich people and they have to be people who want the right thing. I dont mean the right thing in the conventional sense. Things people who want a dream come true want. Something wonderful.
Id want a house like that, said Ellie. You make me see it, feel it Yes, this would be a lovely place to live. Everything one has dreamed of come true. One could live here and be free, not hampered, not tied round by people pushing you into doing everything you dont want, keeping you from doing anything you do want. Oh I am so sick of my life and the people who are round me and everything!