"They'd destroy me," he said, "if they could. How they can take
pleasure in it, Simpson! It's incredible, incomprehensible."
We said it was, but it wasn't in the least. We knew the pleasure,
the indestructible pleasure, he gave us; we knew the irresistible
temptation that he offered. As for destroying him, we knew that they
wouldn't have destroyed him for the world. He was their one bright
opportunity. What would they have done without their Wrackham?
He kept on at it. He said there had been moments this last year
when, absurd as it might seem, he had wondered whether after all he
hadn't failed. That was the worst of an incessant persecution; it
hypnotized you into disbelief, not as to your power (he rubbed that
in), but as to your success, the permanence of the impression you
had made. I remember trying to console him, telling him that he was
all right. He'd got his public, his enormous public.
There were consolations we might have offered him. We might have
told him that he _had_ succeeded; we might have told him that, if he
wanted a monument, he'd only got to look around him. After all, he'd
made a business of it that enabled him to build a Tudor mansion with
bathrooms everywhere and keep two motor-cars. We could have reminded
him that there wasn't one of the things he'd got with it--no, not
one bathroom--that he would have sacrificed, that he was capable of
sacrificing; that he'd warmed himself jolly well all over and all
the time before the fire of life, and that his cucumbers alone must
have been a joy to him. And of course we might have told him that he
couldn't have it both ways; that you cannot have bathrooms and
motor-cars and cucumber-frames (not to the extent _he_ had them)
_and_ the incorruptible and stainless glory. But that wouldn't have
consoled him; for he wanted it both ways. Fellows like Wrackham
always do. He wasn't really happy, as a really great man might have
been, with his cucumbers and things.
He kept on saying it was easy enough to destroy a Great Name. Did
they know, did anybody know, what it cost to build one?
I said to myself that possibly Antigone might know. All I said to
him was, "Look here, we're agreed they can't do anything. When a man
has once captured and charmed the great Heart of the Public, he's
safe--in his lifetime, anyway."
Then he burst out. "His lifetime? Do you suppose he cares about his
lifetime? It's the life beyond life--the life beyond life."
It was in fact, d'you see, the "Life and Letters." He was thinking
about it then.
He went on. "They have it all their own way. He can't retort; he
can't explain; he can't justify himself. It's only when he's dead
they'll let him speak."
"Well, I mean to. That'll show 'em," he said; "that'll show 'em."
"He's thinking of it, Simpson; he's thinking of it," Burton said to
me that evening.
He smiled. He didn't know what his thinking of it was going to
mean--for him.