He had been thinking of it for some considerable time. That
pilgrimage was my last--it'll be two years ago this autumn--and it
was in the spring of last year he died.
He was happy in his death. It saved him from the thing he dreaded
above everything, certainty of the ultimate extinction. It has not
come yet. We are feeling still the long reverberation of his vogue.
We miss him still in the gleam, the jest gone forever from the
papers. There is no doubt but that his death staved off the ultimate
extinction. It revived the public interest in him. It jogged the
feeble pulse of his once vast circulation. It brought the familiar
portrait back again into the papers, between the long, long columns.
And there was more laurel and a larger crowd at Brookwood than on
the day when we first met him in the churchyard at Chenies.
And then we said there had been stuff in him. We talked (in the
papers) of his "output." He had been, after all, a prodigious, a
gigantic worker. He appealed to our profoundest national instincts,
to our British admiration of sound business, of the self-made,
successful man. He might not have done anything for posterity, but
he had provided magnificently for his child and widow.
So we appraised him. Then on the top of it all the crash came, the
tremendous crash that left his child and widow almost penniless. He
hadn't provided for them at all. He had provided for nothing but his
own advertisement. He had been living, not only beyond his income,
but beyond, miles beyond, his capital, beyond even the perennial
power that was the source of it. And he had been afraid, poor
fellow! to retrench, to reduce by one cucumber-frame the items of
the huge advertisement; why, it would have been as good as putting
up the shop windows--his publishers would instantly have paid him
less.
His widow explained tearfully how it all was, and how wise and
foreseeing he had been; what a thoroughly sound man of business. And
really we thought the dear lady wouldn't be left so very badly off.
We calculated that Burton would marry Antigone, and that the simple,
self-denying woman could live in modest comfort on the mere proceeds
of the inevitable sale. Then we heard that the Tudor mansion, the
"Grounds," the very cucumber-frames, were sunk in a mortgage; and
the sale of his "effects," the motor-cars and furniture, the books
and the busts, paid his creditors in full, but it left a bare
pittance for his child and widow.
They had come up to town in that exalted state with which courageous
women face adversity. In her excitement Antigone tried hard to break
off her engagement to Grevill Burton. She was going to do
typewriting, she was going to be somebody's secretary, she was going
to do a thousand things; but she was not going to hang herself like
a horrid millstone round his neck and sink him. She had got it into
her head, poor girl, that Wrackham had killed himself, ruined
himself by his efforts to provide for his child and widow. They had
been the millstones round _his_ neck. She even talked openly now
about the "pot-boilers" they had compelled Papa to write; by which
she gave us to understand that he had been made for better things.
It would have broken your heart to hear her.
Her mother, ravaged and reddened by grief, met us day after day (we
were doing all we could for her) with her indestructible, luminous
smile. She could be tearful still on provocation, through the smile,
but there was something about her curiously casual and calm,
something that hinted almost complacently at a little mystery
somewhere, as if she had up her sleeve resources that we were not
allowing for. But we caught the gist of it, that we, affectionate
and well-meaning, but thoroughly unbusiness-like young men, were not
to worry. Her evident conviction was that he _had_ foreseen, he
_had_ provided for them.
"Lord only knows," I said to Burton, "what the dear soul imagines
will turn up."
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?"