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By Root 336 0

as a result speedily declined, the Crippleville hills limited the growth of the city in that direction and the development remained what it was. There was the further point that the road from the city centre to Crippleville led through reasonably pleasant areas; to get to almost every other suburb you had to drive through slums. I considered these factors, I say, only when it was all done; and I held my breath. I suppose it was my single-mindedness and conviction which made it possible for me to get credit so easily; though it was also my good fortune to deal with an American bank anxious to establish itself on the island. I don’t imagine any of the older British or Canadian banks would have been so accommodating; and I would not have blamed them.

A man, passionate for security, works and saves for a lifetime and is lucky at the end to have ten thousand pounds. Another, placid with the knowledge of his own imminent extinction, makes half a million dollars in five years. Neither ambition nor design comes into it, I feel. The gift falls on us. When we are in the middle of success nothing seems so easy or natural; in failure, nothing seems so unlikely. Observe how my luck, my intuition served me. With my initial scheme beginning to prosper, I took the precaution of buying up as much of the surrounding land as I could. I was gambling – though it did not seem so to me then – with all that I might have comfortably earned. This land I did not develop in the same way. I left many open spaces, divided the rest into small lots, eight to the acre, which I offered at proportionately lower prices: $500 a lot, ground rent $125 a year, a house for $5,000. Amazing value; the rush might be imagined. Simple again; yet I might so easily have tried to repeat myself, and that would have landed me in trouble, as it landed some of my imitators. Our middle class was small; the number of people willing or able to spend a good deal on a house was limited. As it was, the less luxurious new development reinforced the smartness of the old; and the smartness of the old gave glamour to the new. Each development supported the other; Crippleville acquired an integrity which was to last. It wasn’t forethought; it was instinct, intuition.

So success led to success; and it seemed that I could just go on. It was unsettling, this rightness, this sureness over what always later turned out to have been a knife’s edge. I did not feel responsible for what had befallen me; I always felt separate from what I did. Time alone has erased the feeling of unreality, violation and self-awe; it is only now that I feel I can truly lay claim to my achievement. I remember a trifling incident; it occurred almost at the beginning. The men were landscaping. In the afternoon the foreman told me that they had run into the stump and roots of a giant tree; three charges of dynamite had been necessary to get rid of it. He showed me the crater: a monstrous wound in the red earth. A giant tree, old perhaps when Columbus came: I would have liked to have seen it, I would have liked to have preserved it. I kept a piece of the wood on my desk, for the interest, as a reminder of violation, as a talisman. Success has its alarms! It was open to me to go on, I said. Soon I began to feel that I had to go on. Between this and inactivity, between the alarm of a world without end and a world without point, there was no middle way. And I was glad, to tell the truth, when the time for withdrawal came. It might seem perverse. But the gift which falls on us is also an intolerable burden. It sets us apart; it distorts us; it separates us from the self we recognize and to which we remain close. Every week in some part of the world a man, starting from scratch, makes a hundred thousand pounds, which he will soon lose. The tragedy and even the chagrin lie only in the eyes of the beholder. The gift is Mephistophelean. It is, however unconsciously, willed away. But even then the taint remains.

On the island, in our group, we were set apart. Jealousy or envy is not a sufficient explanation. See how disquieting