They had known each other about six months when he proposed to her,
and she wouldn't have him. He went on proposing at ridiculously
short intervals, but it wasn't a bit of good. Wrackham wouldn't give
his consent, and it seemed Antigone wouldn't marry anybody without
it. He _said_ Burton was too poor, and Antigone too young; but the
real reason was that Burton's proposal came as a shock to his
vanity. I told you how coolly he had appropriated the young man's
ardent and irrepressible devotion; he had looked on him as a
disciple, a passionate pilgrim to his shrine; and the truth, the
disillusionment, was more than he could stand. He'd never had a
disciple or a pilgrim of Burton's quality. He could ignore and
disparage Burton's brilliance when it suited his own purpose, and
when it suited his own purpose he thrust Burton and his brilliance
down your throat. Thus he never said a word about Burton's novels
except that he once went out of his way to tell me that he hadn't
read them (I believe he was afraid to). Antigone must have noticed
_that_, and she must have understood the meaning of it. I know she
never spoke to him about anything that Burton did. She must have
felt he couldn't bear it. Anyhow, he wasn't going to recognize
Burton's existence as a novelist; it was as if he thought his
silence could extinguish him. But he knew all about Burton's
critical work; there was his splendid "Essay on Ford Lankester"; he
couldn't ignore or disparage that, and he didn't want to. He had had
his eye on him from the first as a young man, an exceptionally
brilliant young man who might be useful to him.
And so, though he wouldn't let the brilliant young man marry his
daughter, he wasn't going to lose sight of him; and Burton continued
his passionate pilgrimages to Wildweather Hall.
I didn't see Wrackham for a long time, but I heard of him; I heard
all I wanted, for Burton was by no means so tender to him as he used
to be. And I heard of poor Antigone. I gathered that she wasn't
happy, that she was losing some of her splendor and vitality. In all
Burton's pictures of her you could see her droop.
This went on for nearly three years, and by that time Burton, as you
know, had made a name for himself that couldn't be ignored. He was
also making a modest, a rather painfully modest income. And one
evening he burst into my rooms and told me it was all right.
Antigone had come round. Wrackham hadn't, but that didn't matter.
Antigone had said she didn't care. They might have to wait a bit,
but that didn't matter either. The great thing was that she had
accepted him, that she had had the courage to oppose her father. You
see, they scored because, as long as Wrackham had his eye on Burton,
he didn't forbid him the house.
I went down with him soon after that by Wrackham's invitation. I'm
not sure that he hadn't his eye on me; he had his eye on everybody
in those days when, you know, his vogue, his tremendous vogue, was
just perceptibly on the decline.
I found him changed, rather pitiably changed, and in low spirits.
"They"--the terrible, profane young men--had been "going for him"
again, as he called it.
Of course when they really went for him he was all right. He could
get over it by saying that they did it out of sheer malevolence,
that they were jealous of his success, that a writer cannot be great
without making enemies, and that perhaps he wouldn't have known how
great he was if he hadn't made any. But they didn't give him much
opportunity. They were too clever for that. They knew exactly how to
flick him on the raw. It wasn't by the things they said so much as
by the things they deliberately didn't say; and they could get at
him any time, easily, by praising other people.
Of course none of it did any violence to the supreme illusion. He
was happy. I think he liked writing his dreadful books. (There must
have been something soothing in the act with its level, facile
fluency.) I know he enjoyed bringing them out. He gloated over the
announcements. He drew a voluptuous pleasure from his proofs. He
lived from one day of publication to the other; there wasn't a
detail of the whole dreary business that he would have missed. It
all nourished the illusion. I don't suppose he ever had a shadow of
misgiving as to his power. What he worried about was his prestige.
He couldn't help being aware that, with all he had, there was still
something that he hadn't. He knew, he must have known, that he was
not read, not recognized by the people who admired Ford Lankester.
He felt their silence and their coldness strike through the warm
comfort of his vogue. We, Burton and I, must have made him a bit
uneasy. I never in my life saw anybody so alert and so suspicious,
so miserably alive to the qualifying shade, the furtive turn, the
disastrous reservation.
But no, never a misgiving about Himself. Only, I think, moments of a
dreadful insight when he heard behind him the creeping of the tide
of oblivion, and it frightened him. He was sensitive to every little
fluctuation in his vogue. He had the fear of its vanishing before
his eyes. And there he was, shut up among all his splendor with his
fear; and it was his wife's work and Antigone's to keep it from
him, to stand between him and that vision. He was like a child when
his terror was on him; he would go to anybody for comfort. I
believe, if Antigone and his wife hadn't been there, he'd have
confided in his chauffeur.