“You were meant by heaven to be a husband,” I muttered, unconvinced, “you look at a picture on the wall as if you were saying: ‘How are you to-day, dear?’”
“But even if one does one’s best, as you say,” Hobart went on, “it’s the being beaten in the end that annoys me. I hate the certainty of being beaten in the end. I can throw it off now I’m young—comparatively young. But look at ’em pile up: Failures, humiliations, estrangements, the beastly little stabs at you, your own cursed mistakes—why, one is beaten in the beginning, for that matter. When you’re young, even a little young, you don’t know that. But as you get older, even supposing you do your best, you know you’re beaten. It’s deuced unsportsmanlike of somebody.”
I looked at Pelleas with the glance that means an alarm, for something to be done at once. He knew; and he did quite what I had hoped.
“We are more than seventy,” Pelleas said serenely, “and we’re not beaten.”
“But you—” Hobart protested, “you’ve had half the world at your feet. You’ve won everything. You’ve been ...” and so on, in his choicest social hyperbole.
“Hobart,” Pelleas said, “Etarre and I have been married for fifty years. In that time we have lost, year after year, both hopes and realities. I have seen my work harshly criticized and even justly rejected. One year we had hardly a centime to pay Nichola. As it is, we escape from each day by way of the dark for fear the next will find us penniless. We lost—we need not speak of that, but you know how our little boy—my son—died before his first birthday. O, do you think.... The sorrows, the estrangements, the failures, the ill-health, the little stabs at us, above all the cursed mistakes of my own—do you think we have not had these? Do you think we don’t know, Hobart? Do you think we haven’t paid, to the last farthing? Good God!” said Pelleas. “And yet we are not beaten. And we never shall be beaten, dead or alive. And without defiance. Without defiance.”
“No,” said I, nodding with all my might, “never beaten. Except for a little at a time when it hurts most. But never beaten.”
“How, though?” Hobart said helplessly, “I say, how do you do it, you know?”
“Well, you see,” Pelleas answered gravely, “I don’t know much about myself. One doesn’t know. I don’t know where I stop and where The Rest Of It begins. I stop somewhere, I dare say—my consciousness and all that must stop somewhere. But I’ve never found the last of me. I’ve always felt as if I were working along with a few sets of faculties when I’ve really got no end of them. And I don’t know where these stop. Perhaps they don’t stop at all. And so when I get a knock-down blow I fall all of a heap—that is, as much of me as I know about falls. That much of me may be beaten. But not the rest. And then I reach up a hand to the rest of me that I don’t know about and I say: ‘But there’s all that strength left that I don’t know yet. And I don’t know where that stops. I’ve never found out that it stops at all. It is infinite strength and I can use it and be it when I like.’ Beaten?” said Pelleas; “I can no more be beaten than I can be smothered in the open air. That strength is exhaustless, like the air. And nothing can shut it out—nothing.”
“Not even your own mistakes? Not even irreparable loss?” said Hobart.