His son was a brisker thinner man who decided that the house must be finished once and for all. He had grown up in the knowledge that his father had been, to a certain extent, a figure of fun and was determined that he himself would not be humorous or play the clown for anybody. For this reason he would rise early in the morning and start on the house. The village would resound to his hammering day after day. He never ceased working. He was also resolute that he would do all the work himself. It is true that he couldn’t handle a hammer as well as his forebears but what he lost in skill he made up for in determination. ‘One should never leave a job incomplete,’ he would say, staring you straight in the eye. ‘Never. It is immoral. Laziness is immoral.’ And as most of the villagers were themselves lazy, standing at the corners of their houses with their hands in their pockets most of the day, he wasn’t liked much. ‘I have other things I must do after this is completed,’ he would say. And so he would work like a slave. People said that he would kill himself but in fact he didn’t. He seemed to be very tough physically and never once had an illness while he was building the house, though he worked in the rain and sometimes in the snow.
Eventually one morning he finished it. People thought that he would have a celebration party but he didn’t. He wasn’t the kind of man who cared for sentiment. But when the house was completed it was noticed that he would stand looking at it and then move onward and look at it from another angle. A depression hung over the village. The villagers had thought that they would be glad when the house was finished but they weren’t. It was partly because it wasn’t as good as they had expected (after all builders had been working at it for a hundred years at least and perhaps even longer than that) and in comparison with their dreams it looked more ordinary than they had expected. They didn’t quite know what they had expected, but they had certainly expected a structure more elaborate and elegant than they got. It seemed to be saying that after all man’s imagination is much the same everywhere.
But the real trouble was that they didn’t have so much to talk about. In the past if there was a pause in the conversation they would start to tell some story about That House or if they didn’t have actual stories about it they would invent some. In any case the village seemed to grow gloomier and gloomier. Some of them wanted to smash the house down so that it could be started all over again. But of course they wouldn’t do that for they were all basically law-abiding people. But they grew to hate the last of the Macraes, who was called William. And as he sensed this he began to avoid them. He too grew tired of looking at the house in which he had begun to live. He had bought very ordinary furniture for it, and all the usual conveniences of a house, and in fact made it look very common and not to be distinguished from the other houses of the village except that it was a stone house. People would say how different he was from his forefathers and what fine ideas they had had, and what plans and ideals they had nursed. William tried to mix with them but not very successfully since, though he enquired about their families, they knew that fundamentally he wasn’t interested. Obscurely they felt that they had been betrayed. Was all their legend-making to end up like this after all, with this very ordinary house which seemed to answer very trivial problems? Why, because it was lived in, the house didn’t even have any ghosts! The villagers had even been cheated of that! They looked forward to William’s death and for this reason hoped that he would not marry, since they would then have the freedom to do with the house what their imaginations wished. They actively discouraged any girl in the village from marrying him, though at the same time they were worried lest he should import a wife from somewhere else. But in fact he showed no sign of doing that. On the contrary, he would sit in the house brooding for hours and it was even rumoured that he wished to pull the house down and start again. But all the zest had left him – perhaps he had overworked too long – and he remained where he was in his ordinary house with the ordinary curtains and the ordinary carpets and furniture.
He died of some form of melancholia. After his death, all the furniture and carpets etc. were sold by a dull-looking niece of his from outside the island who had no intention of coming back. The house remained empty since there was no one who wanted to buy it and a satisfactory series of legends began to blossom around it, most of them having to do with mysterious lights at windows, men reading Bibles in a greenish light or telling stories to phantom children. Stories were freely invented and the best of them survived and the worst perished. The most mysterious statement they found was in one of the books which the second Macrae had kept. It read, ‘When all the lies have been answered, other lies will have to be invented.’ The villagers thought that in inventing legends they were being true to the early founders of the house and looked at it as women will stand at a church door watching the bride coming out and dreaming that she at least will begin a race of uncorrupted children, not realising that for this to happen she must be a virgin of the
