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