Chase entered hurriedly, and asked a question of a man standing by; he looked haggard and ill, but the answer to his question appeared to reassure him, and he slipped quietly to the chair that somebody offered him. Several people recognized him, and pointed him out to one another. Nutley stared, incredulous and indignant. Just like his sly ways again! Why take the trouble to write and say he was detained by press of business, when he had every intention of coming? Sly. Well, might he enjoy himself, listening to the sale of his house; Nutley, with an angry shrug, wished him joy.
Meanwhile Mr. Webb’s voice, above him, continued to advocate Jakes’ cottage, “either as a building site or as a tea-room, gentlemen; I needn’t point out to you the advantages of either in the heart of a picturesque village on a well-frequented motor route. The garden’s only a quarter of an acre, but you have seen it to-day on your way from the station; a perfect picture. What offers? Come! We’re disposed to let this lot go cheap as the cottage is in need of repair. It’s a real chance for somebody.”
“One hundred guineas,” called out a fat man, known to Nutley as the proprietor of an hotel in Eastbourne.
“And fifty,” said Jakes in a trembling voice.
Nutley suppressed a cackle of laughter.
“And seventy-five,” said the fat man, after glaring at Jakes.
“Two hundred,” said Jakes.
Chase sat on the edge of his chair, twisting his fingers together and keeping his eyes fixed on Jakes. So the man was trying to save his garden! – and the flowers, through whose roots he said he would put a bagginhook sooner than let them pass to a stranger. Where did he imagine he could get the money, poor fool? The fat man was after the cottage for some commercial enterprise. What had the auctioneer suggested – a tea-room? That was it, without a doubt – a tea-room! A painted sign-board hanging out to attract motorists; little tin tables in the garden, perhaps, on summer evenings.
The fat man ran Jakes up to two hundred and fifty before Jakes began to falter. Something in the near region of two hundred and fifty was the limit, Chase guessed, to which his secret and inscrutable financial preparations would run. What plans had he made before coming, poor chap; what plans, full of a lamentable pathos, to meet the rivalry of those who might possibly have designs upon his tenement? Surely not very crafty plans, or very adequate? They had reached two hundred and seventy-five. Jakes was distressed; and to Nutley, scornfully watching, as to Chase, compassionately watching, and as to the auctioneer, impartially watching, it was clear that neither conscience nor prudence counselled him to go any further.
“Two hundred and seventy-five guineas are bid,” said the voice of the auctioneer; “two hundred and seventy-five guineas,” – pause – ”going, going . . .”
“Three hundred,” brought out Jakes, upon whose forehead sweat was standing.
“And ten,” said the fat man remorselessly.
Jakes shook his head as the auctioneer looked at him in inquiry.
“Three hundred and ten guineas are bid,” said the auctioneer, “three hundred and ten guineas,” his voice rising and trailing, “no more? – a little more, sir, come!” in persuasion to Jakes, who shook his head again. “Lot 4, gentlemen, going for the sum of three hundred and ten guineas, going, going, gone.” The hammer came down with a sharp tap, and Mr. Webb leant across his desk to take the name and address of the purchaser.
Jakes began making his way out of the room. He had the shameful air of one who has failed before all men in the single audacity of his life-time. For him, Lot 4 had been the lot that must rivet everyone’s attention; it had been not an episode but the apex. Chase saw him slink out, burdened by disgrace. It would be several hours before he regained the spirit to put the bagginhook through the flowers.
“Lot 5 . . .” Callous as Roman sports proceeding on the retreat of the conquered gladiator. Scatter sand on the blood! Chase sat on, dumbly listening, the auctioneer’s voice and the rap of the hammer twanging, metallic, across the chords of his bursting head. He had surely been mad to come, – to expose himself to this pain, madder than poor Jakes, who at least came with a certain hope. What had brought him – his body felt curiously light; he knew only that he had slipped out of his lodgings at six that morning, had found his way into trains, his limbs performing the necessary actions for him, while his mind continued remote and fixed only upon the distant object towards which he was being rapidly carried. His house – during this miserable week in Wolverhampton, what had they been doing to his house? – perpetrating what infamy? Sitting in the train his mind glazed into that one concentration – Blackboys; he had wondered dimly whether he would indeed find the place where he had left it, among the trees, or whether he had dreamt it, under an enchantment; whether life in Wolverhampton – his office, his ledgers, his clerks, his lodgings – were not the only reality? Still his limbs, intelligent servants, had carried him over the difficulties of the cross-country journey, rendering him at the familiar station – a miracle. As he crossed the stile at the bend of the footpath – for he had taken the short cut across the fields from the station – he had come upon the house, he had heard his breath sob in his throat, and he had repressed the impulse to stretch out both his hands . . . With his eagerness his steps had quickened. It was the house, though not as he knew it. Not slumbrous. Not secluded. Carriages and motors under the trees, grooms and chauffeurs strolling about, idly staring. The house unveiled, prostituted; yes, it was like seeing one’s mistress in a slave-market. He had bounded up the steps into the hall, where a handful of loafing men had quizzed him impertinently. The garden door opposite stood open, and he could see right up the garden; was puzzled, in passing, because he missed the peacocks parading the blazon of their spread tails. The familiarity of the proportions closed instantly round him. Wolverhampton receded; this was reality; this was home.
He had gone up the staircase, his head reeling with anger when he saw that the pictures had been taken down from their places, and stood propped along the walls of the upper passage, ticketed and numbered. He had madly resented this interference with his property. Then he had gone into the gallery, sick and blind, dazzled by the sight that met him there, as though he had come suddenly into too strong a light. He had assured himself at once that they had not yet reached the selling of the house. Still his – and he stumbled into a chair and assisted at the demolition of Jakes.
The windows were wide open; bees blundered in and out; the tops of the woods appeared, huge green pillows; above them the cloudless sky; Midsummer day. Where, then, was the sweet harmony of the house and garden that waited upon the lazy hours of such a day? – driven out by dust and strangers, the Long Gallery made dingy by rows of chairs, robbed of its own mellow furnishing, robbed of its silence by sharp voices; the violation of sanctuary. Chase sat with his fingers knotted together between his knees. Perhaps a score of people in that room knew him by sight; to the others he was an onlooker; to the ones who knew him, an owner hoping for a good price. They must know he was poor – the park fence was lichen-covered and broken down in many places; the road up to the house was overgrown with weeds. Poor – obliged to sell; the place, for all its beauty, betrayed its poverty. Only the farmers looked prosperous. (Those farmers must have prospered better than they ever admitted, for here was one of them buying-in at a most respectable figure the house and lands he rented.) His over-excited senses quietening down a little, he paid attention to the progress of the sale, finding there nothing but the same intolerable pain; the warmth of his secret memory stirred by the chill probe of the words he heard pronounced from the auctioneer’s desk – ”ten acres of fallow, known as Ten-Acre Field, with five acres, three roods, and two perches of wood, including a quantity of fine standing timber to the value of two hundred and fifty pounds” – he knew that wood; it was free of undergrowth, and the bare tree-trunks rose like columns straight out of a sea of bluebells: two hundred and fifty pounds’ worth of standing timber. Walking in Ten-Acre Field outside the edge of that wood he had scared many a rabbit that vanished into the wood with a frisk of white tail, and had startled the rusty pheasants up into heavy flight.
Knocked down to the farmer who had just bought-in his farm.
He didn’t much resent the fields and woods going to the farmers. If anyone other than himself must have them, let it be the yeomen by whom they were worked and understood. But the house – there was the rub, the anguish. Nutley had mentioned a Brazilian (Nutley’s most casual word about the house, or a buyer for the house, had remained indelibly stamped on Chase’s mind.) He looked about now, for the first time since he had come into the room, and discovered Nutley leaning against the auctioneer’s high chair, then he discovered the young man who must certainly be the Brazilian in question, and all the dread which had been hitherto, so to speak, staved off, now smote him with its imminence as his eyes lighted on the unfamiliar, insouciant face.
The new owner, lounging there, insufferable, graceful, waiting without impatience, so insultingly unperturbed! Cool as a cucumber, that young man, accustomed to find life full of a persevering amiability. Chase made a movement to rise; he wanted to fly the room, to escape an ordeal that appalled his soul, but his shyness held him down: he could not create a sensation before so many people. Enraged as he was by the weakness that caught him thus, and prevented him from saving himself while there was still time, he yet submitted, pinned to his chair, enduring such misery as made all his previous grief sink to the level of mere discomfort. He yearned even after hours that lay in the past, and that at the time of their being had seemed to him, in all truth, sufficiently weighted; the hours he had spent standing beside the dealers during their minute examination of his possessions, while he wrung out his pitiable flippancies; then, in those days, he had known that ultimately they would take their leave, and that he would be left to turn back alone into his house, greeted by the dog beating his tail against the legs of the furniture, as pleased as his master; or the hour when, sitting in this very gallery (how different then!), he had read through Nutley’s offensive booklet, and had not known whether it was chiefly anger or pain that drove extravagant ideas of revolt across his mind; those hours by comparison now appeared to him elysian – he had tasted then but the froth on the cup of bitterness of which he now reached the dregs.
God, how quickly they were getting through the lots! Lot 14 was already reached, and 16 was the house. Surely no soul could withstand such pressure, but must crumble like a crushed shell? When they actually reached Lot 16, when he heard the auctioneer start off with his “Now, gentlemen . . .” what would he do then, how would he behave? It was no longer shyness that held him, but fascination, and a physical sickness that made his body clammy and moist although he was shivering with cold. Fear must be like this, and from his heart he pitied all those who were mortally afraid. He noticed that several people were looking at him, amongst others Nutley, and he thought that he must be losing control of his reason, for it seemed to him that Nutley’s face was yellow and pointed, and was grinning at him with a squinting malevolence, an oblique derision, altogether fantastic, and pushed up quite close to him, although in reality Nutley was some way off. He put up his hand to his forehead, and one or two people made an anxious movement towards him, as though they thought he was going to faint. He rejected them with a vague gesture, and at that moment heard the auctioneer say, “Lot 16, gentlemen . . .”