He didn't die. Not then, not all at once. He had an illness
afterward that sent his circulation up to I don't know what, but he
didn't die of it. He knew his business far too well to die then. We
had five blessed years of him. Nor could we have done with less.
Words can't describe the joy he was to us, nor what he would have
been but for Antigone.
I ought to tell you that he recovered his spirits wonderfully on our
way back from Chenies. He had mistaken our attentions to Antigone
for interest in _him_, and he began to unbend, to unfold himself, to
expand gloriously. It was as if he felt that the removal of Ford
Lankester had left him room.
He proposed that Burton and I should make a pilgrimage some day to
Wildweather Hall. He called it a pilgrimage--to the shrine, you
understand.
Well, we made it. We used to make many pilgrimages, but Burton made
more than I.
The Sacred Place, you remember, was down in East Devon. He'd built
himself a modern Tudor mansion--if you know what that is--there and
ruined the most glorious bit of the coast between Seaton and
Sidmouth. It stood at the head of a combe looking to the sea. They'd
used old stone for the enormous front of it, and really, if he'd
stuck it anywhere else, it might have been rather fine. But it was
much too large for the combe. Why, when all the lights were lit in
it you could see it miles out to sea, twinkling away like the line
of the Brighton Parade. It was one immense advertisement of Charles
Wrackham, and must have saved his publishers thousands. His
"grounds" went the whole length of the combe, and up the hill on the
east side of it where his cucumber frames blazed in the sun. And
besides his cucumbers (anybody can have cucumbers) he had a yacht
swinging in Portland Harbor (at least he had that year when he was
at his height). And he had two motor-cars and a wood that he kept
people out of, and a great chunk of beach. He couldn't keep them off
that, and they'd come miles, from Torquay and Exeter, to snapshot
him when he bathed.
The regular approach to him, for pilgrims, was extraordinarily
impressive. And not only the "grounds," but the whole interior of
the Tudor mansion, must have been planned with a view to that alone.
It was all staircases and galleries and halls, black oak darknesses
and sudden clear spaces and beautiful chintzy, silky rooms--lots of
them, for Mrs. Wrackham--and books and busts and statues everywhere.
And these were only his outer courts; inside them was his sanctuary,
his library, and inside that, divided from it by curtains, was the
Innermost, the shrine itself, and inside the shrine, veiled by his
curtains, was Charles Wrackham.
As you came through, everything led up to him, as it were, by easy
stages and gradations. He didn't burst on you cruelly and blind you.
You waited a minute or two in the library, which was all what he
called "silent presences and peace." The silent presences, you see,
prepared you for him. And when, by gazing on the busts of
Shakespeare and Cervantes, your mind was turned up to him, then you
were let in. Over that Tudor mansion, and the whole place, you may
say for miles along the coast, there brooded the shadow of Charles
Wrackham's greatness. If we hadn't been quite so much oppressed by
that we might have enjoyed the silent presences and the motor-cars
and things, and the peace that was established there because of him.
And we did enjoy Antigone and Mrs. Wrackham.
It's no use speculating what he would have been if he'd never
written anything. You cannot detach him from his writings, nor would
he have wished to be detached. I suppose he would still have been
the innocent, dependent creature that he was: fond, very fond of
himself, but fond also of his home and of his wife and daughter. It
was his domesticity, described, illustrated, exploited in a hundred
papers, that helped to endear Charles Wrackham to his preposterous
public. It was part of the immense advertisement. His wife's gowns,
the sums he spent on her, the affection that he notoriously lavished
on her, were part of it.
I'll own that at one time I had a great devotion to Mrs. Wrackham
(circumstances have somewhat strained it since). She was a woman of
an adorable plumpness, with the remains of a beauty which must have
been pink and golden once. And she would have been absolutely simple
but for the touch of assurance that was given her by her position as
the publicly loved wife of a great man. Every full, round line of
her face and figure declared (I don't like to say advertised) her
function. She existed in and for Charles Wrackham. You saw that her
prominent breast fairly offered itself as a pillow for his head. Her
soft hands suggested the perpetual stroking and soothing of his
literary vanity, her face the perpetual blowing of an angelic
trumpet in his praise. Her entire person, incomparably soft, yet
firm, was a buffer that interposed itself automatically between
Wrackham and the bludgeonings of fate. As for her mind, I know
nothing about it except that it was absolutely simple. She was a
woman of one idea--two ideas, I should say, Charles Wrackham the
Man, and Charles Wrackham the Great Novelist.
She could separate them only so far as to marvel at his humanity
because of his divinity, how he could stoop, how he could
condescend, how he could lay it all aside and be delightful as we
saw him--"Like a boy, Mr. Simpson, like a boy!"
It was our second day, Sunday, and Wrackham had been asleep in his
shrine all afternoon while she piloted us in the heat about the
"grounds." I can see her now, dear plump lady, under her pink
sunshade, saying all this with a luminous, enchanting smile. We were
not to miss him; we were to look at him giving up his precious, his
inconceivably precious time, laying himself out to amuse, to
entertain us--"Just giving himself--giving himself all the time."
And then, lest we might be uplifted, she informed us, still with the
luminous, enchanting smile, that Mr. Wrackham was like that to
"everybody, Mr. Simpson; everybody!"
She confided a great many things to us that afternoon. For instance,
that she was greatly troubled by what she called "the ill-natured
attacks on Mr. Wrackham in the papers," the "things" that "They"
said about him (it was thus vaguely that she referred to some of our
younger and profaner critics). She was very sweet and amiable and
charitable about it. I believe she prayed for them. She was quite
sure, dear lady, that "They" wouldn't do it if "They" knew how
sensitive he was, how much it hurt him. And of course it didn't
really hurt him. He was above it all.
I remember I began that Sunday by cracking up Burton to her, just to
see how she would take it, and perhaps for another reason. Antigone
had carried him off to the strawberry-bed, where I gathered from
their sounds of happy laughter that they were feeding each other
with the biggest ones. For the moment, though not, I think,
afterward, Antigone's mother was blind and deaf to what was going on
in the strawberry-bed. I spoke to her of Burton and his work, of the
essay on Ford Lankester, of the brilliant novel he had just
published, his first; and I even went so far as to speak of the
praise it had received; but I couldn't interest her in Burton. I
believe she always, up to the very last, owed Burton a grudge on
account of his novels; not so much because he had so presumptuously
written them as because he had been praised for writing them. I
don't blame her, neither did he, for this feeling. It was
inseparable from the piety with which she regarded Charles Wrackham
as a great figure in literature, a sacred and solitary figure.
I don't know how I got her off him and on to Antigone. I may have
asked her point-blank to what extent Antigone was her father's
daughter. The luminous and expansive lady under the sunshade was a
little less luminous and expansive when we came to Angelette, as she
called her; but I gathered then, and later, that Antigone was a
dedicated child, a child set apart and consecrated to the service
of her father. It was not, of course, to be expected that she should
inherit any of his genius; Mrs. Wrackham seemed to think it
sufficiently wonderful that she should have developed the
intelligence that fitted her to be his secretary. I was not to
suppose it was because he couldn't afford a secretary (the lady
laughed as she said this; for you see how absurd it was, the idea of
Charles Wrackham not being able to afford anything). It was because
they both felt that Antigone ought not to be, as she put it,
"overshadowed" by him; he wished that she should be associated,
intimately associated, with his work; that the child should have her
little part in his glory. It was not only her share of life which he
took and so to speak put in the bank for her, but an investment for
Antigone in the big business of his immortality. There she was,
there she always would be, associated with Charles Wrackham and his
work.
She sighed under the sunshade. "That child," she said, "can do more
for him, Mr. Simpson, than I can."
I could see that, though the poor lady didn't know it, she suffered
a subtle sorrow and temptation. If she hadn't been so amiable, if
she hadn't been so good, she would have been jealous of Antigone.
She assured us that only his wife and daughter knew what he really
was.
We wondered, did Antigone know? She made no sign of distance or
dissent, but somehow she didn't seem to belong to him. There was
something remote and irrelevant about her; she didn't fit into the
advertisement. And in her remoteness and irrelevance she remained
inscrutable. She gave no clue to what she really thought of him.
When "They" went for him she soothed him. She spread her warm
angel's wing, and wrapped him from the howling blast. But, as far
as we could make out, she never committed herself to an opinion. All
her consolations went to the tune of "They say. What say they? Let
them say." Which might have applied to anybody. We couldn't tell
whether, like her mother, she believed implicitly or whether she saw
through him.
She certainly saw beyond him, or she couldn't have said the things
she did--you remember?--at Ford Lankester's funeral. But she had
been overwrought then, and that clear note had been wrung from her
by the poignancy of the situation. She never gave us anything like
that again.
And she was devoted to him--devoted with passion. There couldn't be
any sort of doubt about it.
Sometimes I wondered even then if it wasn't almost entirely a
passion of pity. For she must have known. Burton always declared she
knew. At least in the beginning he did; afterwards he was not clear
about it any more than I was then. He said that her knowledge, her
vision, of him was complete and that her pity for him was
unbearable. He said that she would have given anything to have seen
him as her mother saw him and as he saw himself, and that all her
devotion to him, to it, his terrible work, was to make up to him for
not seeing, for seeing as she saw. It was consecration, if you like;
but it was expiation too, the sacrifice for the sin of an unfilial
clarity.
And the tenderness she put into it!
Wrackham never knew how it protected him. It regularly spoilt our
pleasure in him. We couldn't--when we thought of Antigone--get the
good out of him we might have done. We _had_ to be tender to him,
too. I think Antigone liked us for our tenderness. Certainly she
liked Burton--oh, from the very first.