But everyone else thought him crazy, people sober watching the vaingloriousness of a man drunk. Even the auctioneer allowed an expression of surprise to cross his face, and varied his formula by saying suavely, “Did I understand you to say thirty-five thousand, sir? Thirty-five thousand guineas are bid.”
Drunk. As a man drunk. Everything appeared smothered to his senses; intense, yet remote. His head light and swimming. Everything at a great distance. The crowd around him, stirring, murmurous, but meaningless. The auctioneer, perched up there, a diminutive figure, miles away. Voices, muffled but enormously significant, conveying threats, conveying combat. All leagued against him. This was battle; all the faces were hostile. Or so he imagined. He was glad of it. Fighting for his house? No, no! more, far more than that: fighting for the thing he loved. Fighting to shield from rape the thing he loved. Fighting alone; come to his senses in the very nick of time. Even at this moment, when he needed every wit he had ever had at his command, he found time for a deep inward thankfulness that the illumination had not come too late or altogether passed him by. In the nick of time it had come, and he had recognized it; recognized it for what it was, and seized hold of it, and now, triumphantly, drunkenly, was holding his own in the face of all this dismay and opposition. Moreover, they could not defeat him. Bidding in these outrageous sums that need never be paid over, he was possessed of an inexhaustible fortune. Undefeatable – what confidence that gave him! The more hands turned against him the better. He challenged everybody; he hardly knew what he was saying, only that he leapt up in thousands, and that in spite of their astonishment and fury they were powerless against him: there was nothing criminal or even illegal in his buying-in his own house if he wanted to.
And then the end, that came before he knew that it was imminent; the collapse of the Brazilian, whose expression had at last changed from deliberate indifference to real bad temper; the voice of the auctioneer, suavely asking for his name and his address; and his own voice, giving his name as though for the first time in his life he were not ashamed of it. And then Nutley, struggling across the room to him, snarling and yapping at him like a little enraged cur, quite vague and deprived of significance, but withal noisy, tiresome, and briefly perplexing; a Nutley disproportionately enraged, furiously gesticulating, spluttering at him, “Are you going to play this damned fool game with the rest of the sale?” and his answer – he supposed he had given answer, because of the announcement from the auctioneer’s desk, which hushed the noisy room into sudden silence, “I have to inform you, gentlemen, that Lot 16, and the succeeding lots, which include the contents of the mansion, also the surrounding park, have been bought in, and that the sale is therefore at an end.”
And, in the mist of his bewilderment, the sensation of having his hand sought for and wrung, while he gazed down into Mr. Farebrother’s old rosy face and heard him say, half inarticulate with emotion, “I’m so glad, Mr. Chase, I congratulate you, I’m so glad, I’m so glad.”
XVIII
Finally, the blessed peace and solitude, when the last stranger with the curious stare that was now common to them all had quitted the house, and the last motor had rolled away. Chase, leaning against a column of the porch, thought that thus must married lovers feel when after the confusion of their wedding they are at length left alone together. Certainly – with a wry twist to his lip – the events of the sale had tried him as sorely as any wedding. But here he was, having won, in possession, having driven away all that rabble; here he was in the warmth, and in the hush that sank back upon everything after the ceasing of all that hubbub; here he was left alone upon the field after that reckless victory. Poor? Yes, but he could work, he would manage; his poverty would not be bitter, it would be sweet. He suddenly stretched out his hands, and passionately laid them, palms flattened, against the bricks; bricks warm as their own rosiness with the sun they had drunk since morning.
Midsummer day. Swallows skimming after the insects above the moat. Their level wings almost grazed the water as they swooped. Midsummer day. All the mellowness of Blackboys, all the blood of the Chases, to culminate in this midsummer day. A marvellous summer. A persistently marvellous summer. He remembered the procession of days, the dawns and the dusks and the moon-bathed nights, that had hallowed his romance. He was inclined to believe that neither hatred nor its ugly kin could any longer find any place in his heart, which had been so uplifted and had seen so radiantly the flare of so many beacons lighting up the fields of wisdom. To cast off the slavery of the Wolverhamptons of this world. To know what one really wanted, what one really cared for, and to go for it straight. Wasn’t that a good enough and simple enough working wisdom for a man to have attained? Simple enough, when it did nobody any harm – yet so few seemed to learn it.
Blackboys! Wolverhampton! What was Wolverhampton beside Blackboys? What was the promise of that mediocre ease beside the certainty of these exquisite privations? What was that drudgery beside this beauty, this pride, this Quixotism?
Thane gambolled out, fawning and leaping round Chase, as Fortune opened the door of the house.
“Will you be having dinner, sir,” he asked demurely, “in the dining-room or in the garden this evening?”
THE END
Seducers in Ecuador first published in 1924 by The Hogarth Press
The Heir first published in 1922 by Wm. Heinmann
This edition published 2011 by Bello
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Copyright © Vita Sackville-West, 1922
Copyright © Vita Sackville-West, 1924
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ucers in Ecuador and the Heir
Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir Page 13
