The Return of the Prodigal Part 39

"Thank G.o.d," I said.

He smiled grimly. "G.o.d doesn't come into it," he said. "It's Lankester I've given up."

"You haven't!" I said.

He said he had.

He was very cool and calm about it, but I saw in his face the marks of secret agitation. He had given Lankester up, but not without a struggle. I didn't suppose he was wriggling out of the other thing, he said. He couldn't touch Lankester after Wrackham. It was impossible for the same man to do them both. It wouldn't be fair to Lankester or his widow. He had made himself unclean.

I a.s.sured him that he hadn't, that his motive purged him utterly, that the only people who really mattered were all in the secret; they knew that it was Antigone who had let him in for Wrackham; they wouldn't take him and his Wrackham seriously; and he might be sure that Ford Lankester would absolve him. It was high comedy after Lankester's own heart, and so on. But nothing I said could move him.

He stuck to it that the people in the secret, the people I said mattered, didn't matter in the least, that his duty was to the big outside public for whom Lives were written, who knew no secrets and allowed for no motives; and when I urged on him, as a final consideration, that he'd be all right with _them_, _they_ wouldn't understand the difference between Charles Wrackham and Ford Lankester, he cried out that that was what he meant. It was his business to make them understand. And how could they if he identified himself with Wrackham? It was almost as if he identified Lankester----

Then I said that, if that was the way he looked at it, his duty was clear. He must give Wrackham up.

"Give up Antigone, you mean," he said.

He couldn't.

VII

Of course it was not to be thought of that he should give up his Lankester, and the first thing to be done was to muzzle Furnival's young men. I went to Furny the next day and told him plainly that his joke had gone too far, that he knew what Burton was and that it wasn't a bit of good trying to force his hand.

And then that evening I went on to Antigone.

She said I was just in time; and when I asked her "for what?" she said--to give them my advice about her father's "Memoirs."

I told her that was precisely what I'd come for; and she asked if Grevill had sent me.

I said no, he hadn't. I'd come for myself.

"Because," she said, "he's sent them back."

I stared at her. For one moment I thought that he had done the only sane thing he could do, that he had made my horrible task unnecessary.

She explained. "He wants Mamma and me to go over them again and see if there aren't some things we'd better leave out."

"Oh," I said, "is that all?"

I must have struck her as looking rather queer, for she said, "All?

Why, whatever did you think it was?"

With a desperate courage I dashed into it there where I saw my opening.

"I thought he'd given it up."

"Given it up?"

Her dismay showed me what I had yet to go through. But I staved it off a bit. I tried half-measures.

"Well, yes," I said, "you see, he's frightfully driven with his Lankester book."

"But--we said--we wouldn't have him driven for the world. Papa can wait. He _has_ waited."

I ignored it and the tragic implication.

"You see," I said, "Lankester's book's awfully important. It means no end to him. If he makes the fine thing of it we think he will, it'll place him. What's more, it'll place Lankester. He's still--as far as the big outside public is concerned--waiting to be placed."

"He mustn't wait," she said. "It's all right. Grevill knows. We told him he was to do Lankester first."

I groaned. "It doesn't matter," I said, "which he does first."

"You mean he'll be driven anyway?"

It was so far from what I meant that I could only stare at her and at her frightful failure to perceive.

I went at it again, as I thought, with a directness that left nothing to her intelligence. I told her what I meant was that he couldn't do them both.

But she didn't see it. She just looked at me with her terrible innocence.

"You mean it's too much for him?"

And I tried to begin again with no, it wasn't exactly that--but she went on over me.

It wouldn't be too much for him if he didn't go at it so hard. He was giving himself more to do than was necessary. He'd marked so many things for omission; and, of course, the more he left out of "Papa," the more he had to put in of his own.

"And he needn't," she said. "There's such a lot of Papa."

I knew. I scowled miserably at that. How was I going to tell her it was the whole trouble, that there was "such a lot of Papa"?

I said there was; but, on the other hand, he needed such a lot of editing.

She said that was just what they had to think about. _Did_ he?

I remembered Burton's theory, and I put it to her point-blank. Had she read all of him?

She flushed slightly. No, she said, not all. But Mamma had.

"Then" (I skirmished), "you don't really know?"

She parried it with "Mamma knows."

And I thrust. "But," I said, "does your mother really understand?"

I saw her wince.

"Do you mean," she said, "there are things--things in it that had better be kept out?"