If You Can ... Lose

by E. L. White

IF YOU CAN ... LOSE.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss.

The little shop was dying hard.

Throughout the forenoon its torpidity had been barely disturbed by the tinkle of the door-bell that announced customers; and even these had failed to drift in during the afternoon.

About the hour of four, Carolus Wicks—the proprietor of the shop—ceased his pacing of the uneven floor and, crossing to the millinery counter—where perilous stacks of straw hats flanked a flawed mirror in a gilded frame—intently regarded himself in the glass.

He saw a face planned on a scale generous to nobility, with majesty in the poise of the head and with every line of the massive features instinct with forceful individuality. The eye that pierced the semi-gloom of the mirror was that of a Personality.

He viewed his reflection with a certain somber pride.

“Destiny!” he murmured. “It's the final proof. I shall follow Bolingbroke!”

He uttered the name as one who invokes a Power.

Crossing to the door, he cast a long look around him, from the cage with the glazed top—where he intermittently dwelt, when he doubled the mysterious entity of “Cash” with that of “Sign”—to the counter laden with bales of Manchester goods.

The “Manchester” was Wicks's specialty.

Slowly he walked out into the street and began to put up the shutters.

In the middle of his task, he stopped suddenly, as though petrified; a gleam kindled in his eye at the sight of a man who, in the full glare of the westering sun, strode in the middle of the street, with the conscious pride of its creator.

He attracted attention both by his arrogant carriage and dominant expression. His sartorial perfection was rather that of advertisement than the self-effacing quality of the well-dressed man.

This was Horatio Bolingbroke—a man who had found a cinderheap and made a town thereof—who played with financial issues as a juggler with his balls—who dehumanized men to puppets, in the furtherance of his ambitions.

A curious smile stole round Wicks's mouth, as he marked the eagle eyes, the winged nostrils, the resolute mouth. For he knew that he was gazing at the replica of the face in the glass.

He braced his shoulders, and gloomily appreciative of the drama of his situation, stepped into the back-parlor behind the shop, to make his announcement.

“I've just put up the shutters. Probably for the last time!”

His wife looked up from the letter that she was writing. Her comely full-blown prettiness resembled that of a rose whose petals have been assaulted hy storm, for her large pink cheeks were damp and her hair disheveled.

“Doesn't it sound awful? Oh, dear, oh, dear! I never thought when I married you that you would bring me to this!”

She looked around her sitting-room, with the culminating glory of hand-labor evident in each treasure—-hand-painted piano-top, hand-carved book-case, hand-embroidered cushion. Even the flowers were not subject to Nature's limitation of mortality.

With a sigh, she took up her pen again.

“I'm writing to Uncle Elijah to jog his memory about the loan. He may send it us yet. He's been known to do funny things sometimes.”

“And it would be a funny thing,” sneered Wicks. “Who's likely to give £500 for me? I'm not a competition sweet-pea, nor yet a prize story.”

As he spoke, he glanced in the glass. In the setting sunlight, with frowning brows and folded arms, he might have been Napoleon on board the Bellerophon.

“A woman always expects a man to succeed,” he said, “but women are poor judges of conditions. The greatest is prone to failure.... Take Bolingbroke! It's common talk that he's on the verge of ruin. Yet I saw him, two minutes ago, swaggering down the street, flower in his buttonhole and twirling his stick, as though he was going smash for the good of his health. It was fine, though!” His face brightened. “That buttonhole, now! The spirit of bravado. He may be a scamp, swindler—what you like—but you can't deny he's a man!”

May Wicks colored with exasperation.

“Really, haven't you troubles enough of your own to look after, without raving about that rogue? You exhaust my patience. Why don't you go up to Woodruff House to find out what's happening there?”

Her husband's blank face forced her to explain.

“I never knew such a man! Haven't you heard they're operating on old Draycott today, and a poor chance at best? Trust you not to know, with the funeral order already placed, and just at a time when some ready money might tide us over until the luck turned. Oh, don't stand there! Put on your hat and go!”

As his wife literally thrust him from the room, Wicks shrank to the defensive male. But on the threshold, he came back, and taking from a vase an artificial carnation, he put it in his buttonhole.

He stepped into the red sunlight, his mind a riot of conflicting emotions, paramount among them a smarting sense of injury at his wife's lack of comprehension.

She blamed him for his failure, while his mental vision was shot by the vivid streak of a gigantic constellation hurtling through space to flaming combustion and drawing in its train its least satellite.

But while he pitied her for that feminine practicality that made it impossible for her to follow him into his refuge of imagination, the subterranean current of her resentment rankled none the less acutely. It left him alone with his Secret—the enchanting force which possessed him to the exclusion of nearly every other interest.

While doomed in the finite world to stand behind a counter, he was yet conscious of being at grips with far-reaching issues, stretching beyond his ken into the uncharted region of the Infinite. He was as one who stands before a curtain, which, at any moment, might be drawn aside.

It had all begun with his inordinate admiration of Bolingbroke and his own facial resemblance to the great man. Although he was too modest to allude to it himself, its existence had been proved on that historic occasion when he and his family had been admitted to the reserved paddock at the races.

As his worship passed into a creed, he began to study the private history of his idol, to find the first link of the chain forged by destiny.

By extraordinary coincidence, he and Bolingbroke had been born on the same day.

On the shock of the discovery, there followed a whole sequence of duplications, each cumulative and leading up to the electric discovery. It was a revelation of almost staggering force, revealing as it did—to the material mind of the draper—the existence of an unseen Power.

He—Carolus Wicks—was the Shadow of the great Substance—Horatio Bolingbroke.

Despite the inward exultation of a share in that coveted but denied power, Wicks's thoughts, as he walked along, were gloomy enough to satisfy his wife's pessimism. He found himself instinctively avoiding recognition, in morbid anticipation of the neglect that would be accorded to the insolvent tradesman. When he reached the residential quarter of the town, the urgent need to save his poor little business from disruption infused his errand with the acid of anxiety.

Woodruff House—a detached residence standing in its own grounds—was built on the top of a hilly road. Of solid structure and uninspired architecture, it barely stood out against the clouded sky—pearly-white as pear-blossom. A long line of windows flashed back on every pane a crystal sun.

A graveled drive, bordered with shrubs, led up to the front portico, in front of which was drawn a car, as though in readiness. On each side of the path, the earth was pierced with scores of tiny green spears, that spoke of the conquest of a regiment of snowdrops over the invasion of frost.

As Wicks neared the house, he saw, leaning over the gates, the humped outline of a motionless figure.

With a thrill of prescience he recognized the silent watcher. It was Bolingbroke.

As he gazed in awed admiration, Bolingbroke abruptly turned his massive head and shot a look of interrogation. Wicks thought he detected surprise—the astonishment of a man suddenly confronted with his own shadow.

In the pride of that mutual recognition, he almost forgot the urgency of his errand, until Bolingbroke recalled it.

“Want to go in?”

He moved away from the gates as he spoke.

“No, thank you, sir.” Although his voice was beyond his control, Wicks chose his words with care, in his anxiety to create his impression.

“I'm here—merely as a spectator. I trust you will not credit me with any nefarious designs. But the truth is that my affairs cause this house to be of vital interest to me. In short, sir, I'm watching the windows.”

Bolingbroke started. Then he made an illustrative motion—the gesture of one who has subdued the art of pantomime to supplement public oratory.

Wicks nodded.

“That's it, sir. I'm waiting to see if those blinds come down.... I am sure I don't know why I should intrude my little affairs on you, but—it would make all the difference to me.”

“How's that?”

The question was almost barked.

Carolus Wicks felt in his pocket. Even in the exposition of the calamity that was blasting him, the fact that he was about to establish a basis: of intimate confidence between his idol and himself drew its sting from the situation. He was drenched with the unreasoning elation of a fulfilled dream.

With trembling fingers, he presented his card.

“Perhaps you'll condescend to read that, sir?” He persisted in his attitude of humility, with an artful impulse to render the moment of self-revelation more overwhelming. “Yes, sir ... an uncommon name. Useful asset in trade.... Well, sir, for some years, for various causes, I've been playing a losing game. I've been up against big odds—” he threw open his chest with a militant gesture—“cramped for want of capital when I wanted to expand. It's maddening to feel yourself full of suppressed power throttled up inside you like steam with no outlet—all driven back upon you till it breaks you up—all because you're too strong for your limits and can't open out!”

He saw that Bolingbroke was studying him with intent interest.

“Go on!” he commanded.

“So, sir, I borrowed. But it wasn't enough. Not for me. And the luck turned against me. You may be the pluckiest caller in the world, but it doesn't help when the other holds the cards. And so—” he swallowed in his throat, searching for some fitting phrase wherewith to veil his ignominy—“so, at this present minute, sir, I—I'm afraid I can't call myself solvent!”

Bolingbroke laughed shortly.

“Broke? It's happened before. But—where's the connection between you—and this?”

He jerked his thumb towards the line of gleaming windows.

Recalled to a sense of fast-dissolving reality, Wicks spoke soberly.

“Because, even now, at the eleventh hour, a little ready money might help me to tide over. In the drapery, especially in small towns, it's customary to include an undertaking branch. And the old gentleman lying up there is”—he tapped his forehead before he remembered the status of his auditor. “What I mean is he's what you would call an eccentric.”

“What I call a ruddy crank,” amended Bolingbroke curtly.

“Precisely, sir. In any case, he's had his funeral planned and entrusted to me these two years. I assure you, it will be more like a pageant than a funeral. Make live men feel there's some compensation, if they've got to go. And—it will be a cash transaction.”

Bolingbroke frowned incredulously.

“Mean to tell me twopence would set you on your legs again?”

“Everything is a matter of degree.”

Wicks spoke stiffly. Yet even while his failure seemed of pitiful inadequacy, that strange, exultant conviction reminded him that he was—in some dim way—a participant in a vast financial collapse.

Bolingbroke seemed to have forgotten his companion, as he leaned over the gate in brooding melancholy.

Suddenly he turned, and spoke as though on impulse.

“Your story has interested me—extraordinarily. We are total strangers. Yet the curious fact is that your history might be my own. In miniature, of course. Know me?”

As he tilted his chin arrogantly, Wicks gasped at the amazing modesty of the query.

“Is there anyone who doesn't know Mr. Horatio Bolingbroke? The papers——”

“Ah, yes, the Press—curse it!” Bolingbroke glowered at a corner of cheap ivory-tinted paper that protruded from Wicks's pocket. “Then you know that I'm on the verge of an almighty smash. And—-same as in your case—I stand to be richer by some six figures by that man's death.... God! If only those blinds would come down!”

Both men stared at the house. It seemed to stand out from its background with additional prominence, now that the twilight was beginning to fall. The clouds were rolling away, and against a strip of lemon-green sky, Sirius showed faintly, as a point of silver wire. A thrush, on a naked copper-beech, burst into its recurrent phrase.

Bolingbroke consulted his watch.

“Ought to be over. Lord, we're a pair of precious churchyard ghouls, on the gloat.”

“I know.” Wicks spoke deprecatingly. “But I understand that this operation can only give partial relief—merely a prolongation of misery. God knows I wish for no man's death!”

“And God knows I do!” Bolingbroke gripped Wicks's shoulder and spoke in a sharpened tone.

“Look man—look!”

At one of the windows appeared the figure of a woman in a nursing uniform. Even at that distance, Wicks could distinguish the raven wings of hair that framed a pale, melancholy face with the racial traits of a Jewess.

Her poise was instinct with fate as she raised her arm.

“Pull, woman!”

A passion of force was concentrated in Bolingbroke's whisper. Wicks noticed his hands, as they gripped the gate, and shuddered to see how instantly the veins started out in swollen lumps.

The nurse stood motionless for a space. It seemed to Wicks that, in that moment of suspense, the atmosphere was rarefied to the cracking-point of tensity, and he feared to draw a breath, lest a feather should disturb the balance.

The woman threw open the window and turned away.

Bolingbroke smothered an oath. Regaining his self-control, he turned to his companion.

“Odd that we—strangers—should be partners in this deal!”

“No, it's not odd at all.”

Wicks purposely omitted the “sir” that marked the division of values. His eyes glowed brilliantly from the pallor of his face. While he felt that the great moment of revelation was at hand, he distrusted his own temerity.

“It's not odd,” he repeated defiantly. “It is Destiny.... I must ask you to listen to some strange facts, which you can verify. You and I were born on the same date—April 2, 1874. No, don't interrupt! We were both married in 1898—went into business in 1900.... There's lots more, too. Personal tastes all duplicated. Oh, I've ferreted it out. Asked roundabout questions, read chatty paragraphs—'Who's Who'——

Bolingbroke interrupted.

“Trust the Press to know a man's name and business before he is born! You're sober, man, aren't you? Well, what was your object in this—inquisition?”

Wicks grasped at the remnant of his courage.

“Because I have always admired you above all other men. I can't make you realize what you stand for to me. Bigness. That's it. And although I'm only a small tradesman, I've felt bigness, too—inside me. And I've felt it wonderful that we should pair like we do. In looks too. I've often been mistaken for you.”

Bolingbroke scrutinized him intently.

“Strange,” he said at last, “that a man should not know his own face! Well—what do you make of it all—my Double?”

Wicks caught at the words.

“You've said it,” he shouted. “Doubles! I'm you and you're me.” The air seemed to thresh under his feet as he spluttered into speech. “We're one Person—in halves. We rise together, sink together.... That's why I don't mind being poor and insignificant, because, through you, I've got my stake in something big. Fate. And you can't alter Fate!'

For answer, Bolingbroke pointed to the house.

“Fate,” he repeated. “There's our fate. It's over!”

As he spoke the front door opened yet wider, and from the shadows of the portico a chauffeur appeared. Under his ministrations, the automobile purred its readiness for departure.

Three men stood upon the threshold. Bolingbroke pointed to one of them—a spare gray man, with something of the bristling activity and intelligence of a rat. This was the famous surgeon, who harnessed inspiration to mathematical precision and inexhaustible nerve.

“Jayne—the throat-man. He's the last word. I know him. He'll put me wise.”

He passed his hand over his brow as he spoke. Wicks was horrified to notice that his face was thickly beaded with great drops of moisture. He viewed them with a feeling of shame as of a devotee who sees the brazen features of his god melt in the furnace.

He was relieved to find himself alone. The air was sharpened at the first invasion of night-frost, and he saw his own breath faintly. In the gathering darkness, the garden showed as a sloe-bloom blue vagueness, against which the naked black tree-trunks of the foreground stood out with the sharpness of scaffolding. Sirius now blazed in electric fire in the violet heavens.

With his eyes fixed on the figures of the four men, now in conversation, Wicks, with his confused sense of merged destinies, trembled at the magnitude of Bolingbroke's stake. A town had grown under his fingers, as a card-castle. And as a player hesitates to lay the topmost card, lest it destroy the balance, so Bolingbroke towered over a tottering structure of factories, shops, offices. One card too many—one venture too hazardous... . On the clear air, Bolingbroke's laugh rang out.

Wicks's gasp was almost a sob. So all was well.

Suddenly he was conscious of a teasing sensation, as of the wings of butterflies beating on his face. Putting up his hand, he found, to his surprise, that drops of sweat were coursing slowly down his cheeks.

Unwittingly, he had duplicated Bolingbroke's agony of suspense.

The crunching of gravel recalled him to reality. Bolingbroke was walking briskly in his direction.

Wicks marked every detail of his appearance—the gray frock-coat, the white spats—the apricot carnation. Once again, he gloried in the erect carriage of his head and the composure of the face. Some powerful counter-emotion had erased all signs of the vigil.

“Well?”

“Bolingbroke looked at the sanguine face.

“Success. Another two years to go, Jayne says. Wonderful 'op,' I'm told. Big score for Jayne.”

Wicks paled—incredulous of the verdict. So great a crash—while not even a whisper had stirred the evening peace!

“And you—” he stammered; “what will happen to you?”

“To me?” Bolingbroke thrust out his jaw with a truculent movement. “I start over again. That's all.”

That was all. Yet Wicks could not comprehend.

“All over again? You! Sink to the bottom? When you've reached the top? Impossible! When you——”

Bolingbroke cut him short roughly.

“Good lord, man—it's not what I was! That's past and done with. It's what I am!”

With a nod of farewell, he turned away. But Wicks caught at his arm.

“And me—I——'”

“Ah! It's your funeral too! I forgot. Well, you start over again too, I take it. Don't we pair—my Double?”

Unconscious of any mockery in the smile, Wicks gazed after the receding figure. In this revelation of strength, Bolingbroke outgrew humanity, and Wicks beheld him towering through a Brocken mist.

The glory of the moment bubbled through his veins like strong wine, stirring within him a riot of sensations. Like one who has sustained the shock of explosion, his faculties were §still fluttering vagrants, and his personality a blank vessel for strange tenancy. He was filled with his realization of the supremacy of the Will—the impregnability of the Soul. The Wheel had broken them; yet he and Bolingbroke had arisen from the dust and faced the future—empty yet unafraid.

He walked down the hill, grinding star-dust under his feet.

“Not what I was! What I am!”

At every stride his mind leaped ahead, in pursuit of myriad possibilities. His new start would be unhampered by his old cramped methods. He was now free to develop his operations—to ramify. Plans should no longer be passive captives in brain-cells, but active factors towards success. His past mistakes stood out as milestones towards victory—each a memorial to an error that need never be duplicated. Akin to the Fire of London that cleansed a plague-area, his failure stood revealed in its true glory.

His face heated, his eyes afire, he marched in the middle of the road—a giant among pigmies, while overhead in the darkening sky a belt and sword of stars showed that he walked in titanic company.

He was recalled to a sense of traffic-regulations by a petulant hoot, and he leaped to the pavement, flush with one of the smaller houses.

The gas of the sitting-room had been just lit, and its beam filtered through a rose silk shade with a fringe of pendant crystal beads.

The sight of the decoration reminded Wicks of a similar ornament in the process of manufacture at home.... May would miss her parlor sadly; her puny ambitions became concrete realities in the shapes of cushions and ornaments. Women were like that—bound to little things.

Yet while he pitied her for the limitations of her imagination, the austerity of the new venture claimed May for the first victim.

His face was sober as he neared the end of the road which debouched into the main street, aglow with lavish illumination.

On every side of Wicks were brilliantly lighted shops, each, according to its prosperity, a phase of that trade which he was to exploit to the pinnacle of fortune. In some vague manner, they chilled the hot flow of his confidence.

He looked through the windows of a grocer's shop, towards the counter, behind which a sunken-cheeked man in a white apron, sliced bacon in a machine. He bore the same name as that emblazoned on the shop-sign:

“Munster Stores. Late Chas. King.”

“Suppose I shall have to take a berth, like poor King!”

Wicks instinctively lowered his head, as though warding off a blow between the eyes.

To divert the current of his thoughts, he speculated on the nature of Bolingbroke's second venture. Impossible to conceive him apron-girt and counter-bound! It was easier to picture him as fustian-clad and breaking stones, in symbolic action.

But his mind refused to respond to the stimulus of Bolingbroke. All those small houses and contemptible retail-shops were so much garnered earth-force that, through sheer force of gravity, had sucked his feet from the stars.

He found himself thinking of a little shop, with uneven boards, that, in at least two corners, terminated in a mouse-hole. The mahogany counter was cumbered with stacks of heavy goods—pink flannelette and gray linings. Emerald-green and Wedgewood blue cardboard boxes advertised their treasure of lace and ribbon through many a broken side. Bunches of purple calico violets and yellow primroses were festooned overhead in floral gala. The air was faintly heavy with the odor of unbleached calico.

And, stretching from the shop, the unseen channels that nourished a home, a wife, a family—the unseen strands that bound him to the honorable traditions of the trade—the unseen web of happy associations and the bloom of memories.

Suddenly he became aware of violent internal compression—an unfamiliar sensation which he resisted with all the force of his manhood. He almost ran past a small building whose closed shutters indicated that another small shop was dead.

His latch-key was impotently scraping the paint from the door, when it was opened, and his wife stood before him. He noticed that her lashes were matted with tears.

He shook his head.

“No luck!”

Then the passage was momentarily blotted out, and he was only dimly aware of his wife's arm leading him into the parlor, while with shaking fingers she fluttered something white before his eyes.

“It's just come. The check from Uncle Elijah! Oh, Carolus, we're saved!”

He stared at it with incredulous eyes.

“No, no,” he cried incoherently. “It can't be. Can't go against Destiny. Bolingbroke smashed and I——'”

“Bolingbroke? What has Bolingbroke to do with you? Look!” May's voice rose in an hysterical note. “Look at the check! Can't you realize it?”

Instead of obeying her, Carolus Wicks looked in the glass.

He saw a man with an ill-proportioned head, a shock of rough hair, plebeian features, watery eyes and a tremendous mouth. A face totally lacking in distinction. The face of a nonenity. The face of any small man—of any little tradesman.

Ay, but of a solvent tradesman. While Bolingbroke was a beggar.

Could he realize it? For answer, Carolus Wicks laid his head upon his wife's shoulder, and while she sobbed in happy unison, revealed the full depths—and heights—of his realization.

The Cornhill Magazine. E. L. White.