“Then you can’t know what the curse of not-having really is. You can’t have an idea. You’ve no right to talk about the curse.” Mr. Elver’s harsh, unsteady voice rose and fell excitedly as he talked. “No right,” he repeated.
“Perhaps I haven’t,” said Mr. Cardan mollifyingly. He took the opportunity to pour out some more wine for his host. Nobody has a right, he reflected, to be more miserable than we are. Each one of us is the most unhappily circumstanced creature in the world. Hence it’s enormously to our credit that we bear up and get on as well as we do.
“Look here,” Mr. Elver went on confidentially, and he tried to look Mr. Cardan squarely in the face as he spoke; but the effort was too great and he had to avert his eyes; “look here, let me tell you.” He leaned forward eagerly and slapped the table in front of where Mr. Cardan was sitting to emphasise what he was saying and to call his guest’s attention to it. “My father was a country parson,” he began, talking rapidly and excitedly. “We were very poor—horribly. Not that he minded much: he used to read Dante all the time. That annoyed my mother—I don’t know why. You know the smell of very plain cooking? Steamed puddings—the very thought of them makes me sick now.” He shuddered. “There were four of us then. But my brother was killed in the war and my elder sister died of influenza. So now there’s only me and the one you saw to-night.” He tapped his forehead. “She never grew up, but got stuck somehow. A moron.” He laughed compassionlessly. “Though I don’t know why I need tell you that. For it’s obvious enough, isn’t it?”
Mr. Cardan said nothing. His host flinched away from his half-winking, half-supercilious gaze, and fortifying himself with another gulp of wine, which Mr. Cardan a moment later unobtrusively made good from the flask, went on:
“Four of us,” he repeated. “You can imagine it wasn’t easy for my father. And my mother died when we were still children. Still, he managed to send us to a rather shabby specimen of the right sort of school and we’d have gone on to the university if we could have got scholarships. But we didn’t.” At this Mr. Elver, on whom the wine seemed quite suddenly to be making its effect, laughed loudly, as though he had made a very good joke. “So my brother went into an engineering firm, and it was just being arranged, at goodness knows what sort of a sacrifice, that I should be turned into a solicitor, when pop! my father falls down dead with heart failure. Well, he was all right rambling about the Paradiso. But I had to scramble into the nearest job available. That was how I came to be an advertisement canvasser. Oh, Lord!” He put his hand over his eyes, as though to shut out some disgusting vision. “Talk of the curse of not-having! For a monthly magazine it was—the sort of one with masses of little ads for indigestion cures; and electric belts to make you strong; and art by correspondence; and Why Wear a Truss? and superfluous hair-killers; and pills to enlarge the female figure; and labour-saving washing machines on the instalment system; and Learn to Play the Piano without Practising; and thirty-six reproductions of nudes from the Paris Salon for five bob; and drink cures in plain wrapper, strictly confidential, and all the rest. There were hundreds and hundreds of small advertisers. I used to spend all my days running round to shops and offices, cajoling old advertisers to renew or fishing for new ones. And, God! how horrible it was! Worming one’s way in to see people who didn’t want to see one and to whom one was only a nuisance, a sort of tiresome beggar on the hunt for money. How polite one had to be to insolent underlings, strong in their office and only too delighted to have an opportunity to play the bully in their turn! And then there was that terrible cheerful, frank, manly manner one had to keep up all the time. The ‘I put it to you, sir,’ straight from the shoulder business; the persuasive honesty, the earnestness and the frightful pretence one had to keep up so strenuously and continuously that one believed in what one was talking about, thought the old magazine a splendid proposition and regarded the inventor of advertisements as the greatest benefactor the human race has ever known. And what a presence one had to have! I could never achieve a presence, somehow. I could never even look neat. And you had to try and impress the devils as a keen, competent salesman. God, it was awful! And the way some of them would treat you. As the damnedest bore in the world—that was the best you could hope. But sometimes they treated you as a robber and a swindler. It was your fault if an insufficient number of imbeciles hadn’t bought galvanic belly bands or learned to play like Busoni without practising. It was your fault; and they’d fly in a rage and curse at you, and you had to be courteous and cheery and tactful and always enthusiastic in the face of it. Good Lord, is there anything more horrible than having to face an angry man? I don’t know why, but it’s somehow so profoundly humiliating to take part in a squabble, even when one’s the aggressor. One feels afterwards that one’s no better than a dog. But when one’s the victim of somebody else’s anger—that’s awful. That’s simply awful,” he repeated, and brought his hand with a clap on to the table to emphasise his words. “I’m not built for that sort of thing. I’m not a bully or a fighter. They used to make me almost ill, those scenes. I couldn’t sleep, thinking of them—remembering those that were past and looking forward with terror to the ones that were coming. People talk about Dostoievsky’s feelings when he was marched out into the barrack square, tied to a post with the firing party lined up in front of him and then, at the very last second, when his eyes were already bandaged, reprieved. But I tell you I used to go through his experiences half a dozen times a day, nerving myself to face some inevitable interview, the very thought of which made me sick with apprehension. And for me there was no reprieve. The execution was gone through with, to the very end. Good Lord, how often I’ve hesitated at the door of some old bully’s office, all in a bloody sweat, hesitating to cross the threshold. How often I’ve turned back at the last moment and turned into a pub for a nip of brandy to steady my nerves, or gone to a chemist for a pick-me-up! You can’t imagine what I suffered then!” He emptied his glass, as though to drown the rising horror. “Nobody can imagine,” he repeated, and his voice quivered with the anguish of his self-pity. “And then how little one got in return! One suffered daily torture for the privilege of being hardly able to live. And all the things one might have done, if one had had capital! To know for an absolute certainty that—given ten thousand—one could turn them into a hundred thousand in two years; to have the whole plan worked out down to its smallest details, to have thought out exactly how one would live when one was rich, and meanwhile to go on living in poverty and squalor and slavery—that’s the curse of not-having. That’s what I suffered.” Overcome by wine and emotion, Mr. Elver burst into tears.
Mr. Cardan patted him on the shoulder. He was too tactful to offer the philosophical consolation that such suffering is the lot of nine-tenths of the human race. Mr. Elver, he could see, would never have forgiven such a denial of his dolorous uniqueness. “You must have courage,” said Mr. Cardan, and pressing the glass into Mr. Elver’s hand he added: “Drink some of this. It’ll do you good.”
Mr. Elver drank and wiped his eyes. “But I’ll make them smart for it one day,” he said, banging the table with his fist. The violent self-pity of a moment ago transformed itself into an equally violent anger. “I’ll make them all pay for what I suffered. When I’m rich.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Mr. Cardan encouragingly.
“Thirteen years of it I had,” Mr. Elver went on. “And two and a half years during the war, dressed in uniform and filling up forms in a wooden hut at Leeds; but that was better than touting for advertisements. Thirteen years. Penal servitude with torture. But I’ll pay them, I’ll pay them.” He banged the table again.
“Still,” said Mr. Cardan, “you seem to have got out of it now all right. Living here in Italy is a sign of freedom; at least I hope so.”