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. I’ve driven a lot of people who’ve made money, who’ve worked hard and who’ve got ulcers and coronary thrombosis and many other things as a result of working hard. I didn’t want to work hard. I could do a job as well as another but that was all there was to it. And I hadn’t got ambition, or I didn’t 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 couldn’t quite get hold of, all that had taken it out of him. He hadn’t 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 didn’t 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 Gipsy’s Acre, all those were the things that I’d 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 don’t quite know which way describes it best. I suppose really I was looking for a girl, the right sort of girl – by which I don’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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 won’t 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.
I’d no real idea that that wasn’t all there was to it. I suppose it happens to everyone sooner or later and it happens suddenly. You don’t think as you imagine you’re going to think: ‘This might be the girl for me… This is the girl who is going to be mine.’ At least, I didn’t feel it that way. I didn’t know that when it happened it would happen quite suddenly. That I would say: ‘That’s the girl I belong to. I’m hers. I belong to her, utterly, for always.’ No. I never dreamed it would be like that. Didn’t one of the old comedians say once – wasn’t it one of his stock jokes[14]? ‘I’ve been in love once and if I felt it coming on again I tell you I’d emigrate.’ It was the same with me. If I had known, if I had only known what it could all come to mean I’d have emigrated too! If I’d been wise, that is.
Chapter 4
I hadn’t forgotten my plan of going to the auction.
There was three weeks to go. I’d 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 couldn’t stand them another day but I didn’t 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 wouldn’t care enough about me to make further inquiries and they’d merely think that I was too feverish to send them any more news. Later, I’d turn up in London again, spinning them a yarn of how ill I’d been[15]! But I didn’t 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 hadn’t 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 wasn’t 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 isn’t 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 don’t 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 it’s the first.’
‘Come out of curiosity, did you? I didn’t notice you doing any bidding.’
‘No fear,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to see how it would go.’
‘Well, it’s the way it runs very often. They just want to see who’s interested, you know.’
I looked at him inquiringly.
‘Only three of ’em in it[18], I should say,’ said my friend. ‘Whetherby from Helminster. He’s 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. It’ll go cheap. That’s what everyone says.’
‘Because of the place’s reputation?’ I asked.
‘Oh, you’ve heard about Gipsy’s Acre, have you? That’s only what the country people say. Rural Council ought to have altered that road years ago – it’s a death trap.’
‘But the place has got a bad reputation?’
‘I tell you that’s just superstition. Anyway, as I say, the real business’ll happen now behind the scenes, you know. They’ll go and make offers. I’d
stock jokes – заготовленные шутки
spinning them a yarn of how ill I’d been – заливая им, что я был болен
driving racket – суматоха движения
Unless sold before by private treaty – Если только не будет продан по частной договоренности
‘em = them
