THE LAST LOSS
Three days later it was Easter Day. In the evening, about half-past nine,
when Thomas lay sleeping and Peter was packing the rugs and cushions and
pictures he hadn't paid for into brown paper parcels (a tedious job),
Rodney came in. Peter hadn't seen him for some time.
"What on earth," said Rodney, lighting his pipe and sitting down, "are
you doing with all that upholstery? Has someone been sending you Easter
presents? Well, I'm glad you're getting rid of them as speedily as may
be."
Peter said ruefully, because he was tired of the business, "The stupid
things aren't paid for. So I'm packing them up to be sent back directly
the shops open again. I can't afford them, you see. Already most of my
belongings are in pawn."
"I see." Rodney wasn't specially struck by this; it was the chronic
condition of many of his friends, who were largely of the class who pawn
their clothes on Monday and redeem them on Saturday to wear for Sunday,
and pawn them again, paying, if they can afford it, a penny extra to have
the dresses hung up so that they don't crush.
"A sudden attack of honesty," Rodney commented. "Well, I'm glad, because
I don't see what you want to cumber yourself with all those cushions and
rugs for. You're quite comfortable enough without them."
Peter said, "Thomas and I wanted nice things to look at. We were tired of
horse-hair and 'Grace Sufficient'. Thomas is fastidious."
Rodney put a large finger on Thomas' head.
"Thomas isn't such a fool.... Hullo, there's another of you." Francesco
woke and came out of his corner and laid his nose on Rodney's knee with
his confiding grin.
"Yes, that's San Francesco. Rather nice, isn't he. He's coming with us
too. I called him Francesco instead of Francis that he might feel at
home in Italy."
"Oh, in Italy."
Peter hadn't meant to tell Rodney that, because he didn't think that
Rodney would approve, and he wanted to avoid an argument. But he had let
it out, of course; he could never keep anything in.
"That's where we're going to-morrow, to seek our fortunes. Won't it be
rather good in Italy now? We don't know what we shall do when we get
there, or where we shall go; but something nice, for sure."
"I'm glad," said Rodney. "It's a good country in the spring. Shall you
walk the roads with Thomas slung over your back, or what?"
"I don't know. Partly, I daresay. But we want to find some little place
between the hills and the sea, and stay there. Perhaps for always; I
don't know. It's going to be extraordinarily nice, anyhow."
Rodney glanced at him, caught by the ring in his voice, a ring he hadn't
heard for long. He didn't quite understand Peter. When last he saw him,
he had been very far through, alarmingly near the bottom. Was this
recovery natural grace, or had something happened? It seemed to Rodney
rather admirable, and he looked appreciatively at Peter's cheerful face
and happy eyes.
"Good," he said. "Good--splendid!"
And then Peter, meeting his pleased look and understanding it, winced
back from it, and coloured, and bent over his brown paper and string. He
valued Rodney's appreciation, a thing not easily won. He felt that in
this moment he had won it, as he had never won it before. For he knew
that Rodney liked pluck, and was thinking him plucky.
Against his will he muttered, half beneath his breath, "Oh, it isn't
really what _you_ call good. It is good, you know: _I_ think it's good;
but you won't. You'll call it abominable."
"Oh," said Rodney.
Peter went on, with a new violence, "I know all you'll say about it, so
I'm not going to give you the opportunity of saying it till I'm gone. You
needn't think I'm going to tell you now and let you tell me I'm wrong.
I'm not wrong; and if I am I don't care. Please don't stay any more; I'd
rather you weren't here to-night. I don't want to tell you anything; only
I had just got to say that, because you were thinking.... Oh, do go now."
Rodney sat quite still and looked at him, into him, through him, beyond
him. Then he said, "You needn't tell me anything. I know. Lucy and you
are going together."
Peter stood up, rather unsteadily.
"Well? That's not clever. Any fool could have guessed that."
"Yes. And any fool could guess what I'm going to say about it, too. You
know it all already, of course...."
Rodney was groping for words, helplessly, blindly.
"Peter, I didn't know you had it in you to be a cad."
Peter was putting books into a portmanteau, and did not answer.
"You mean to do that ... to Denis...."
Peter put in socks and handkerchiefs.
"And to Lucy.... I don't understand you, Peter.... I simply don't
understand. Are you mad--or drunk--or didn't I really ever know you in
the least?"
Peter stuffed in Thomas' nightgowns, crumpling them hideously.
"Very well," said Rodney, very quietly. "It doesn't particularly matter
which it is. In any case you are not going to do it. I shall prevent it."
"You can't," Peter flung at him, crushing a woolly rabbit in among
Thomas' clothes.
Rodney sat still and looked at him, resting his chin on his hand; looked
into him, through him, beyond him.
"I believe I can," he said simply.
Peter stopped filling the bag, and, still sitting on the floor by it,
delivered himself at last.
"We care for each other. Isn't that to count, then? We always have cared
for each other. Are we to do without each other for always? We want each
other, we need each other. Denis doesn't need Lucy. He never did; not as
I do. Are Lucy and I to do without each other, living only half a life,
because of him? I tell you, I'm sick to death of doing without things.
The time has come when it won't do any more, and I'm going to take what
I can. I think I would rob anyone quite cheerfully if he had what I
wanted. A few days ago I did rob; I bought things I knew I couldn't pay
for. I'm sending them back now simply because I don't want them any more,
not because I'm sorry I took them. It was fair I should take them; it was
my turn to have things, mine and Thomas's. And now I'm going to take
this, and keep it, till it's taken away from me. I daresay it will be
taken away soon; my things always are. Everything has broken and gone,
one thing after another, all my life--all the things I've cared for. I'm
tired of it. I was sick of it by the time I was ten years old, sick of
always getting ill or smashed up; and that's gone on ever since, and
people have always thought, I know, 'Oh, it's only him, he never minds
anything, he doesn't count, he's just a crock, and his only use is to
play the fool for us.' But I did mind; I did. And I only played the fool
because it would have been drearier still not to, and because there was
always something amusing left to laugh at, not because I didn't mind.
And then I cared for Denis as ... Oh, but you know how I cared for Denis.
He was the most bright and splendid thing I knew in all the splendid
world ... and he chucked me, because everything went wrong that could
go wrong between us without my fault ... and our friendship was
spoilt.... And I cared for Hilary and Peggy; and they would go and do
things to spoil all our lives, and the more I tried, like an ass, to
help, the more I seemed to mess things up, till the crash came, and we
all went to bits together. And we had to give up the only work we
liked--and I did love mine so--and slave at things we hated. And still we
kept sinking and sinking, and crashing on worse and worse rocks, till we
hadn't a sound piece left to float us. And then, when I thought at least
we could go down together, they went away and left me behind. So I'd
failed there too, hopelessly. I always have failed in everything I've
tried. I tried to make Rhoda happy, but that failed too. She left me; and
now she's dead, and Thomas hasn't any mother at all.... And Lucy ... whom
I'd cared for since before I could remember ... and I'd always thought,
without thinking about it, that some day of course we should be
together... Lucy left me, and our caring became wrong, so that at last
we didn't care to see one another at all. And then it was as if hell had
opened and let us in. The other things hadn't counted like that; health,
money, beautiful things, interesting work, honour, friends, marriage,
even Denis--they'd all collapsed and I did mind, horribly. But not like
that. As long as I could see Lucy sometimes, I could go on--and I had
Thomas too, though I don't know why he hasn't collapsed yet. But at last,
quite suddenly, when the emptiness and the losing had been getting to
seem worse and worse for a long time, they became so bad that they were
impossible. I got angry; it was for Thomas more than for myself, I think;
and I said it should end. I said I would take things; steal them, if I
couldn't get them by fair means. And I went down to Astleys, to see them,
to tell them it must end. And in the woods I met Lucy. And she'd been
getting to know too that it must end, for her sake as well as for
mine.... And so we're going to end it, and begin again. We're going to be
happy, because life is too jolly to miss."
Peter ended defiantly, and flung his razor in among the socks.
Rodney had listened quietly, his eyes on Peter's profile. When he
stayed silent, Peter supposed that he had at last convinced him of the
unbreakable strength of his purpose for iniquity, and that he would give
him up and go away. After a minute he turned and looked up at Rodney, and
said, "Now do you see that it's no good?"
Rodney took out his pipe and knocked it out and put it away before he
answered:
"I'm glad you've said all that, Peter. Not that I didn't know it all
before; of course I did. When I said at first that I didn't understand
you, I was lying. I did understand, perfectly well. But I'm glad you've
said it, because it's well to know that you realise it so clearly
yourself. It saves my explaining it to you. It gives us a common
knowledge to start on. And now may _I_ talk for a little, please? No,
not for a little; for some time."
"Go on," said Peter. "But it's no use, you know.... What do you mean by
our common knowledge? The knowledge that I'm a failure?"
Rodney nodded. "Precisely that. You've stated the case so clearly
yourself--in outline, for you've left out a great deal, of course--that
really it doesn't leave much for me to say. Let's leave you alone for
the moment. I want to talk about other people. There are other people
in the world besides ourselves, of course, improbable as the fact
occasionally seems. The fact, I mean, that it's a world not of individual
units but of closely connected masses of people, not one of whom stands
alone. One can't detach oneself; one's got to be in with one camp or
another. The world's full of different and opposing camps--worse luck.
There are the beauty-lovers and the beauty-scorners, and all the
fluctuating masses in between, like most of us, who love some aspects of
it and scorn others. There are the well-meaning and the ill-meaning--and
again the incoherent cross-benchers, who mean a little good and a little
harm and for the most part mean nothing at all either way. Again, there
are what people call the well-bred, the ill-bred, and of course the
half-bred. An idiotic division that, because what do we know, any of us,
of breeding, that we should call it good or bad? But there it is; a most
well-marked division in everyone's eyes. And (and now I'm getting to the
point) there are the rich and the poor--or call them, rather, the Haves
and the Have-nots. I don't mean with regard to money particularly, though
that comes in. But it's an all-round, thing. It's an undoubted fact,
and one there's no getting round, that some people are born with the
acquiring faculty, and others with the losing. Most of us, of course, are
in the half-way house, and win and lose in fairly average proportions.
But some of us seem marked out either for the one or for the other. I
know personally a good many in both camps. Many more of the Have-nots,
though, because I prefer to cultivate their acquaintance. There's a great
deal to be done for the Haves too; they need, I fancy, all the assistance
they can get if they're not to become prosperity-rotten. The Have-Nots
haven't that danger; but they've plenty of dangers of their own; and,
well, I suppose it's a question of taste, and that I prefer them. Anyhow,
I do know a great many. People, you understand, with nothing at all that
seems to make life tolerable. Destitutes, incapables, outcasts, slaves to
their own lusts or to a grinding economic system or to some other cruelty
of fate or men. Whatever the immediate cause of their ill-fortune may be,
its underlying, fundamental cause is their own inherent faculty for
failure and loss, their incompetence to take and hold the good things of
life. You know the stale old hackneyed cry of the anti-socialists, how it
would be no use equalising conditions because each man would soon return
again to his original state. It's true in a deeper sense than they mean.
You might equalise economic conditions as much as you please, but you'd
never equalise fundamental conditions; you'd never turn the poor into the
rich, the Have-Nots into the Haves. You know I'm not a Socialist. I don't
want to see a futile attempt to throw down barriers and merge all camps
in one indeterminate army who don't know what they mean or where they're
going. I'm not a Socialist, because I don't believe in a universal
outward prosperity. I mean, I don't want it; I should have no use for it.
I'm holding no brief for the rich; I've nothing to say about them just
now; and anyhow you and I have no concern with them." Rodney pulled
himself back from the edge of a topic on which he was apt to become
readily vehement. "But Socialism isn't the way out for them any more than
it's the way out for the poor; it's got, I believe, to be by individual
renunciation that their salvation will come; by their giving up, and
stripping bare, and going down one by one and empty-handed into the
common highways, to take their share of hardness like men. It will be
extraordinarily difficult. Changing one's camp is. It's so difficult as
to be all but impossible. Perhaps you've read the Bible story of the
young man with great possessions, and how it was said, 'With men it is
impossible...' Well, the tradition, true or false, goes that in the end
he did it; gave up his possessions and became financially poor. But we
don't know, even if that's true, what else he kept of his wealth; a good
deal, I daresay, that wasn't money or material goods. One can't tell.
What we do know is that to cross that dividing line, to change one's
camp, is a nearly impossible thing. Someone says, 'That division, the
division of those who have and those who have not, runs so deep as almost
to run to the bottom.' The great division, he calls it, between those who
seize and those who lose. Well, the Haves aren't always seizers, I think;
often--more often, perhaps--they have only to move tranquilly through
life and let gifts drop into their hands. It's pleasant to see, if we are
not in a mood to be jarred. It's often attractive. It was mainly that
that attracted you long ago in Denis Urquhart. The need and the want in
you, who got little and lost much, was somehow vicariously satisfied by
the gifts he received from fortune; by his beauty and strength and good
luck and power of winning and keeping. He was pleasant in your eyes,
because of these gifts of his; and, indeed, they made of him a pleasant
person, since he had nothing to be unpleasant about. So your emptiness
found pleasure in his fullness, your poverty in his riches, your weakness
in his strength, and you loved him. And I think if anything could (yet)
have redeemed him, have saved him from his prosperity, it would have been
your love. But instead of letting it drag him down into the scrum and the
pity and the battle of life, he turned away from it and kept it at a
distance, and shut himself more closely between his protecting walls of
luxury and well-being. Then, again, Lucy gave him his chance; but he
hasn't (so far) followed her love either. She'd have led him, if she
could, out of the protecting, confining walls, into the open, where
people are struggling and perishing for lack of a little pity; but he
wouldn't. So far the time hasn't been ripe for his saving; his day is
still to come. It's up to all of us who care for him--and can any of us
help it?--to save him from himself. And chiefly it's your job and Lucy's.
You can do your part now only by clearing out of the way, and leaving
Lucy to do hers. She will do it, I firmly believe, in the end, if you
give her time. Lucy, I know, for I have seen it when I have been with
her, has been troubled about her own removal from the arena, about her
own being confined between walls so that she can't hear the people
outside calling; but that is mere egotism. She can hear and see all
right; she has all her senses, and she will never stop using them. It's
her business to be concerned for Denis, who is blind and deaf. It's her
business to use her own caring to make him care. She's got to drag him
out, not to let herself be shut inside with him. It can be done, and
Lucy, if anyone in the world, can do it--if she doesn't give up and
shirk. Lucy, if anyone in the world, has the right touch, the right
loosing power, to set Denis free. I think that you too have the touch and
the power--but you mustn't use yours; the time for that is gone by. Yours
is the much harder business of clearing out of the way. If you ever loved
Denis, you will do that."
He paused and looked at Peter, who was still sitting on the floor,
motionless, with bent head.
"May I go on?" said Rodney, and Peter answered nothing.
Rodney looked away again out of the window into a grey night sky that
hid the Easter moon, and went on, gently. He was tired of talking; his
discourse had been already nearly as long as an average woman; but he
went on deliberately talking and talking, to give Peter time.
"So, you see, that is an excellent reason--to you it is, I believe, the
incontrovertible reason--why you should once more give up and lose, and
not take. But, deeper than that, to me more insurmountable than that, is
the true reason, which is simply that that very thing--to lose, to do
without--is your business in life, as you've said yourself. It's your
profession. You are in the camp of the Have-Nots; you belong there. You
can't desert. You can't step out and go over to the enemy. If you did, if
you could (only you can't) it would be a betrayal. And, whatever you
gained, you'd lose by it what you have at present--your fellowship with
the other unfortunates. Isn't that a thing worth having? Isn't it
something to be down on the ground with the poor and empty-handed, not
above them, where you can't hear them crying and laughing? Would you, if
you could, be one of the prosperous, who don't care? Would you, if you
could, be one of those who have their joy in life ready-made and put into
their hands, instead of one of the poor craftsmen who have to make their
own? What's the gaiety of the saints? Not the pleasant cheerfulness of
the Denis Urquharts and their kind, who have things, but the gaiety, in
the teeth of circumstances, of St. Francis and his paupers, who have
nothing and yet possess all things. That's your gaiety; the gaiety that
plays the fool, as you put it, looking into the very eyes of agony and
death; that loses and laughs and makes others laugh in the last ditch;
the gaiety of those who drop all cargoes, fortune and good name and love,
overboard lightly, and still spread sail to the winds and voyage, and
when they're driven by the winds at last onto a lee shore, derelicts
clinging to a broken wreck, find on the shore coloured shells to play
with and still are gay. That's your gaiety, as I've always known it and
loved it. Are you going to chuck that gaiety away, and rise up full of
the lust to possess, and take and grasp and plunder? Are you going to
desert the empty-handed legion, whose van you've marched in all your
life, and join the prosperous?" Rodney broke off for a moment, as if he
waited for an answer. He rose from his chair and began to walk about the
room, speaking again, with a more alright vehemence. "Oh, you may think
this is mere romance, fancy, sentiment, what you will. But it isn't. It's
deadly, solid truth. You can't grasp. You can't try to change your camp.
You--and Lucy too, for she's in the same camp--wouldn't be happy, to put
it at its simplest. You'd know all the time that you'd shirked, deserted,
been false to your business. You'd be fishes out of water, with the
knowledge that you'd taken for your own pleasure something that someone
else ought to have had. It isn't in either of you to do it. You must
leave such work to the Haves. Why, what happens the first time you try it
on? You have to send back the goods you've tried to appropriate to where
they came from. It would be the same always. You don't know _how_ to
possess. Then in heaven's name leave possessing alone, and stick to the
job you are good at--doing without. For you are good at that. You always
have been, except just for just one short interlude, which will pass like
an illness and leave you well again. Believe me, it will. I don't know
when, or how soon; but I do know that sometime you will be happy again,
with the things, the coloured shells, so to speak, that you find still
when all the winds and storms have done their worst and all your cargoes
are broken wrecks at your feet. It will be then, in that last emptiness,
that you'll come to terms with disaster, and play the fool again to amuse
yourself and the other derelicts, because, when there's nothing else
left, there's always laughter."
Rodney had walked to the window, and now stood looking out at the dim,
luminous night, wherein, shrouded, the Easter moon dwelt in the heart of
shadows. From many churches, many clocks chimed the hour. Rodney spoke
once more, slowly, leaning out into the shadowy night.
"Through this week," he said, "they have been watching in those churches
a supreme renouncement, the ultimate agony of giving up, the last triumph
of utter loss. I'm not going to talk about that; it's not my business or
my right ... But it surely counts, that giving up whatever we may or may
not believe about it. It shines, a terrible counsel of perfection for
those who have, burning and hurting. But for those who have not, it
doesn't burn and hurt; it shines to cheer and comfort; it is the banner
of the leader of the losing legion, lifted up that the rest may follow
after. Does that help at all?... Perhaps at this moment nothing helps at
all.... Have I said enough? Need I go on?"
Peter's voice, flat and dead, spoke out of the shadow of the dim room.
"You have said enough. You need not go on."
Then Rodney turned and saw him, sitting still on the floor by the
half-packed bag, with the yellow dog sleeping against him. In the dim
light his face looked pale and pinched like a dead man's.
"You've done your work," the flat voice said. "You've taken it away--the
new life we so wanted. You've shown that it can't be. You're quite right.
And you're right too that nothing helps at all.... Because of Denis, I
can't do this. But I find no good in emptiness; why should I? I want to
have things and enjoy them, at this moment, more desperately than you,
who praise emptiness and doing without, ever wanted anything."
"I am aware of that," said Rodney.
"You've got in the way," said Peter, looking up at the tall gaunt figure
by the window; and anger shook him. "You've stepped in and spoilt it all.
Yes, you needn't be afraid; you've spoilt it quite irrevocably. You knew
that to mention Denis was enough to do that. I was trying to forget him;
I could have, till it was too late. You can go home now and feel quite
easy; you've done your job. There's to be no new life for me, or Thomas,
or Lucy, or Francesco--only the same old emptiness. The same old ... oh,
damn!"
Peter, who never swore, that ugly violence being repugnant to his nature,
swore now, and woke Francesco, who put up his head to lick his friend's
face. But Peter pushed him away, surprising him violently, and caught at
his half-filled bag and snatched at the contents and flung them on the
top of one another on the floor. They lay in a jumbled chaos--Thomas's
clothes and Peter's socks and razor and Thomas's rabbit and Peter's
books; and Francesco snuffled among them and tossed them about, thinking
it a new game.
"Go away now." Peter flung out the words like another oath. "Go away to
your poverty which you like, and leave us to ours which we hate. There's
no more left for you to take away from us; it's all gone. Unless you'd
like me to throw Thomas out of the window, since you think breakages are
so good."
Rodney merely said, "I'm not going away just yet. Could you let me stay
here for the night and sleep on the sofa? It's late to go back to-night."
"Sleep where you like," said Peter. "There's the bed. I don't want it."
But Rodney stretched himself instead on the horse-hair sofa. He said no
more, knowing that the time for words was past. He lay tired and quiet,
with closed eyes, knowing how Peter and the other disreputable forsaken
outcast sat together huddled on the floor through the dim night, till the
dawn looked palely in and showed them both fallen asleep, Peter's head
resting on Francesco's yellow back.
It was Rodney who got up stiffly from his hard resting-place in the dark
unlovely morning, and made tea over Peter's spirit-lamp for both of them.
Peter woke later, and drank it mechanically. Then he looked at Rodney and
said, "I'm horribly stiff. Why did neither of us go to bed?" He was pale
and heavy-eyed, and violent no more, but very quiet and tired, as if,
accepting, he was sinking deep in grey and cold seas, that numbed
resistance and drowned words.
The milk came in, and Peter gave Thomas to drink; and on the heels of the
milk came the post, and a letter for Peter.
"I suppose," said Peter dully, as he opened it, "she too has found out
that it can't be done."
The letter said: "Peter, we can't do it. I am horribly, horribly sorry,
but I know it now for certain. Perhaps you know it too, by now. Because
the reason is in you, not in me. It is that you love Denis too much. So
you couldn't be happy. I want you to be happy, more than I want anything
in the world, but it can't be this way. Please, dear Peter, be happy
sometime; please, please be happy. I love you always--if that helps at
all.--Lucy."
Peter let the note fall on the floor, and stood with bent head by the
side of Thomas's crib, while Thomas guggled his milk.
"Two minds with but a single thought," he remarked, in that new, dreary
voice of his. "As always.... Well, it saves trouble. And we're utterly
safe now, you see; doubly safe. You can go home in peace."
Then Rodney, knowing that he could be no more use, left the three
derelicts together.