The Return of the Prodigal Part 37

Then one day she sent for me; for me, mind you, not Burton. There was something that she and her daughter, desired to consult me about. I went off at once to the dreadful little lodgings in the Fulham Road where they had taken refuge. I found Antigone looking, if anything, more golden and more splendid, more divinely remote and irrelevant against the dingy background. Her mother was sitting very upright at the head and she at the side of the table that almost filled the room. They called me to the chair set for me facing Antigone. Throughout the interview I was exposed, miserably, to the clear candor of her gaze.

Her mother, with the simplicity which was her charming quality, came straight to the point. It seemed that Wrackham had thought better of us, of Burton and me, than he had ever let us know. He had named us his literary executors. Of course, his widow expounded, with the option of refusal. Her smile took for granted that we would not refuse.

What did I say? Well, I said that I couldn't speak for Burton, but for my own part I--I said I was honored (for Antigone was looking at me with those eyes) and of course I shouldn't think of refusing, and I didn't imagine Burton would either. You see I'd no idea what it meant. I supposed we were only in for the last piteous turning out of the dead man's drawers, the sorting and sifting of the rubbish heap. We were to decide what was worthy of him and what was not.

There couldn't, I supposed, be much of it. He had been hard pressed.

He had always published up to the extreme limit of his production.

I had forgotten all about the "Life and Letters." They had been only a fantastic possibility, a thing our profane imagination played with; and under the serious, chastening influences of his death it had ceased to play.

And now they were telling me that this thing was a fact. The letters were, at any rate. They had raked them all in, to the last postcard (he hadn't written any to us), and there only remained the Life. It wasn't a perfectly accomplished fact; it would need editing, filling out, and completing from where he had left it off. He had not named his editor, his biographer, in writing--at least, they could find no note of it among his papers--but he had expressed a wish, a wish that they felt they could not disregard. He had expressed it the night before he died to Antigone, who was with him.

"Did he not, dearest?"

I heard Antigone say, "Yes, Mamma." She was not looking at me then.

There was a perfectly awful silence. And then Antigone did look at me, and she smiled faintly.

"It isn't you," she said.

No, it was not I. I wasn't in it. It was Grevill Burton.

I ought to tell you it wasn't an open secret any longer that Burton was editing the "Life and Letters of Ford Lankester," with a Critical Introduction. The announcement had appeared in the papers a day or two before Wrackham's death. He had had his eye on Burton. He may have wavered between him and another, he may have doubted whether Burton was after all good enough; but that honor, falling to Burton at that moment, clinched it. _There_ was prestige, _there_ was the thing he wanted. Burton was his man.

There wouldn't, Mrs. Wrackham said, be so very much editing to do.

He had worked hard in the years before his death. He had gathered in all the material, and there were considerable fragments--whole blocks of reminiscences, which could be left, which _should_ be left as they stood (her manner implied that they were monuments). What they wanted, of course, was something more than editing. Anybody could have done that. There was the Life to be completed in the later years, the years in which Mr. Burton had known him more intimately than any of his friends. Above all, what was necessary, what had been made so necessary, was a Critical Introduction, the summing up, the giving of him to the world as he really was.

Did I think they had better approach Mr. Burton direct, or would I do that for them? Would I sound him on the subject?

I said cheerfully that I would sound him. If Burton couldn't undertake it (I had to prepare them for this possibility), no doubt we should find somebody who could.

But Antigone met this suggestion with a clear "No." It wasn't to be done at all unless Mr. Burton did it. And her mother gave a little cry. It was inconceivable that it should not be done. Mr. Burton must. He would. He would see the necessity, the importance of it.

Of course _I_ saw it. And I saw that my position and Burton's was more desperate than I had imagined. I couldn't help but see the immense importance of the "Life and Letters." They were bound, even at this time of day, to "fetch" a considerable sum, and the dear lady might be pardoned if she were incidentally looking to them as a means of subsistence. They were evidently what she had had up her sleeve. Her delicacy left the financial side of the question almost untouched; but in our brief discussion of the details, from her little wistful tone in suggesting that if Mr. Burton could undertake it at once and get it done soon, if they could in fact launch it on the top of the returning tide--from the very way that she left me to finish her phrases for her I gathered that they regarded the "Life and Letters" as Wrackham's justification in more ways than one. They proved that he had not left them unprovided for.

Well, I sounded Burton. He stared at me aghast. I was relieved to find that he was not going to be sentimental about it. He refused flatly.

"I can't do him _and_ Lankester," he said.

I saw his point. He would have to keep himself clean for _him_. I said of course he couldn't, but I didn't know how he was going to make it straight with Antigone.

"I shan't have to make it straight with Antigone," he said. "She'll see it. She always has seen."

V

That was just exactly what I doubted.

I was wrong. She always had seen. And it was because she saw and loathed herself for seeing that she insisted on Burton's doing this thing. It was part of her expiation, her devotion, her long sacrificial act. She was dragging Burton into it partly, I believe, because he had seen too, more clearly, more profanely, more terribly than she.

Oh, and there was more in it than that. I got it all from Burton. He had been immensely plucky about it. He didn't leave it to me to get him out of it. He had gone to her himself, so certain was he that he could make it straight with her.

And he hadn't made it straight at all. It had been more awful, he said, than I could imagine. She hadn't seen his point. She had refused to see it, absolutely (I had been right there, anyhow).

He had said, in order to be decent, that he was too busy; he was pledged to Lankester and couldn't possibly do the two together. And she had seen all that. She said of course it was a pity that he couldn't do it now, while people were ready for her father, willing, she said, to listen; but if it couldn't be done at once, why, it couldn't. After all, they could afford to wait. _He_, she said superbly, could afford it. She ignored in her fine manner the material side of the "Life and Letters," its absolute importance to their poor finances, the fact that if _he_ could afford to wait, _they_ couldn't. I don't think that view of it ever entered into her head. The great thing, she said, was that it should be done.

And then he had to tell her that _he_ couldn't do it. He couldn't do it at all. "That part of it, Simpson," he said, "was horrible. I felt as if I were butchering her--butchering a lamb."

But I gathered that he had been pretty firm so far, until she broke down and cried. For she did, poor bleeding lamb, all in a minute.

She abandoned her superb att.i.tude and her high ground and put it altogether on another footing. Her father hadn't been the happy, satisfied, facilely successful person he was supposed to be. People had been cruel to him; they had never understood; they didn't realize that his work didn't represent him. Of course she knew (she seems to have handled this part of it with a bold sincerity) what he, Burton, thought about it; but he did realize _that_. He knew it didn't do him anything like justice. He knew what lay behind it, behind everything that he had written. It was wonderful, Burton said, how she did that, how she made the vague phrase open up a vast hinterland of intention, the unexplored and unexploited spirit of him. He knew, Burton knew, how he had felt about it, how he had felt about his fame. It hadn't been the thing he really wanted. He had never had that. And oh, she wanted him to have it. It was the only thing she wanted, the only thing she really cared about, the only thing she had ever asked of Burton.

He told me frankly that she didn't seem quite sane about it. He understood it, of course. She was broken up by the long strain of her devotion, by his death and by the crash afterward, by the unbearable pathos of him, of his futility, and of the menacing oblivion. You could see that Antigone had parted with her sense of values and distinctions, that she had lost her bearings; she was a creature that drifted blindly on a boundless sea of compa.s.sion. She saw her father die the ultimate death. She pleaded pa.s.sionately with Burton to hold back the shadow; to light a lamp for him; to prolong, if it were only for a little while, his memory; to give him, out of his own young radiance and vitality, the life beyond life that he had desired.

Even then, so he says, he had held out, but more feebly. He said he thought somebody else ought to do it, somebody who knew her father better. And she said that n.o.body could do it, n.o.body did know him; there was n.o.body's name that would give the value to the thing that Burton's would. That was handsome of her, Burton said. And he seems to have taken refuge from this dangerous praise in a modesty that was absurd, and that he knew to be absurd in a man who had got Lankester's "Life" on his hands. And Antigone saw through it; she saw through it at once. But she didn't see it all; he hadn't the heart to let her see his real reason, that he couldn't do them both.

He couldn't do Wrackham after Lankester, nor yet, for Lankester's sake, before. And he couldn't, for his own sake, do him at any time.

It would make him too ridiculous.

And in the absence of his real reason he seems to have been singularly ineffective. He just sat there saying anything that came into his head except the one thing. He rather shirked this part of it; at any rate, he wasn't keen about telling me what he'd said, except that he'd tried to change the subject. I rather suspected him of the extreme error of making love to Antigone in order to keep her off it.

Finally she made a bargain with him. She said that if he did it she would marry him whenever he liked (she had considered their engagement broken off, though he hadn't). But (there Antigone was adamant) if he didn't, if he cared so little about pleasing her, she wouldn't marry him at all.

Then he said of course he did care; he would do anything to please her, and if she was going to take a mean advantage and to put it that way----

And of course she interrupted him and said he didn't see her point; she wasn't putting it that way; she wasn't going to take any advantage, mean or otherwise; it was a question of a supreme, a sacred obligation. How _could_ she marry a man who disregarded, who was capable of disregarding, her father's dying wish? And that she stuck to.

I can't tell you now whether she was merely testing him, or whether she was determined, in pure filial piety, to carry the thing through, and saw, knowing her hold on him, that this was the way and the only way, or whether she actually did believe that for him, too, the obligation was sacred and supreme. Anyhow she stuck to it. Poor Burton said he didn't think it was quite fair of her to work in that way, but that, rather than lose her, rather than lose Antigone, he had given in.

VI

He had taken the papers--the doc.u.ments--home with him; and that he might know the worst, the whole awful extent of what he was in for, he began overhauling them at once.

I went to see him late one evening and found him at it. He had been all through them once, he said, and he was going through them again.

I asked him what they were like. He said nothing.

"Worse than you thought?" I asked.

Far worse. Worse than anything I could imagine. It was inconceivable, he said, what they were like. I said I supposed they were like _him_. I gathered from his silence that it was inconceivable what _he_ was. That Wrackham should have no conception of where he really stood was conceivable; we knew he was like that, heaps of people were, and you didn't think a bit the worse of them; you could present a quite respectable "Life" of them with "Letters"

by simply suppressing a few salient details and softening the egoism all round. But what Burton supposed he was going to do with Wrackham, short of destroying him! You couldn't soften him, you couldn't tone him down; he wore thin in the process and vanished under your touch.

But oh, he was immense! The reminiscences were the best. Burton showed us some of them. This was one:

"It was the savage aspects of Nature that appealed to me. One of my earliest recollections is of a thunderstorm among the mountains. My nursery looked out upon the mountainside where the storm broke. My mother has told me that I cried till I made the nurse carry me to the window, and that I literally leaped in her arms for joy. I laughed at the lightning and clapped my hands at the thunder. The Genius of the Storm was my brother. I could not have been more than eleven months old."

And there was another bit that Burton said was even better.

"I have been a fighter all my life. I have had many enemies. What man who has ever done anything worth doing has not had them? But our accounts are separate, and I am willing to leave the ultimate reckoning to time." There were lots of things like that. Burton said it was like that cloak he used to wear. It would have been so n.o.ble if only he had been a little bigger.