There was a perfectly awful silence. And then Antigone did look at
me, and she smiled faintly.
"It isn't you," she said.
No, it was not I. I wasn't in it. It was Grevill Burton.
I ought to tell you it wasn't an open secret any longer that Burton
was editing the "Life and Letters of Ford Lankester," with a
Critical Introduction. The announcement had appeared in the papers a
day or two before Wrackham's death. He had had his eye on Burton. He
may have wavered between him and another, he may have doubted
whether Burton was after all good enough; but that honor, falling to
Burton at that moment, clinched it. _There_ was prestige, _there_
was the thing he wanted. Burton was his man.
There wouldn't, Mrs. Wrackham said, be so very much editing to do.
He had worked hard in the years before his death. He had gathered in
all the material, and there were considerable fragments--whole
blocks of reminiscences, which could be left, which _should_ be left
as they stood (her manner implied that they were monuments). What
they wanted, of course, was something more than editing. Anybody
could have done that. There was the Life to be completed in the
later years, the years in which Mr. Burton had known him more
intimately than any of his friends. Above all, what was necessary,
what had been made so necessary, was a Critical Introduction, the
summing up, the giving of him to the world as he really was.
Did I think they had better approach Mr. Burton direct, or would I
do that for them? Would I sound him on the subject?
I said cheerfully that I would sound him. If Burton couldn't
undertake it (I had to prepare them for this possibility), no doubt
we should find somebody who could.
But Antigone met this suggestion with a clear "No." It wasn't to be
done at all unless Mr. Burton did it. And her mother gave a little
cry. It was inconceivable that it should not be done. Mr. Burton
must. He would. He would see the necessity, the importance of it.
Of course _I_ saw it. And I saw that my position and Burton's was
more desperate than I had imagined. I couldn't help but see the
immense importance of the "Life and Letters." They were bound, even
at this time of day, to "fetch" a considerable sum, and the dear
lady might be pardoned if she were incidentally looking to them as a
means of subsistence. They were evidently what she had had up her
sleeve. Her delicacy left the financial side of the question almost
untouched; but in our brief discussion of the details, from her
little wistful tone in suggesting that if Mr. Burton could undertake
it at once and get it done soon, if they could in fact launch it on
the top of the returning tide--from the very way that she left me to
finish her phrases for her I gathered that they regarded the "Life
and Letters" as Wrackham's justification in more ways than one. They
proved that he had not left them unprovided for.
Well, I sounded Burton. He stared at me aghast. I was relieved to
find that he was not going to be sentimental about it. He refused
flatly.
"I can't do him _and_ Lankester," he said.
I saw his point. He would have to keep himself clean for _him_. I
said of course he couldn't, but I didn't know how he was going to
make it straight with Antigone.
"I shan't have to make it straight with Antigone," he said. "She'll
see it. She always has seen."
V
That was just exactly what I doubted.
I was wrong. She always had seen. And it was because she saw and
loathed herself for seeing that she insisted on Burton's doing this
thing. It was part of her expiation, her devotion, her long
sacrificial act. She was dragging Burton into it partly, I believe,
because he had seen too, more clearly, more profanely, more terribly
than she.
Oh, and there was more in it than that. I got it all from Burton. He
had been immensely plucky about it. He didn't leave it to me to get
him out of it. He had gone to her himself, so certain was he that he
could make it straight with her.
And he hadn't made it straight at all. It had been more awful, he
said, than I could imagine. She hadn't seen his point. She had
refused to see it, absolutely (I had been right there, anyhow).
He had said, in order to be decent, that he was too busy; he was
pledged to Lankester and couldn't possibly do the two together. And
she had seen all that. She said of course it was a pity that he
couldn't do it now, while people were ready for her father, willing,
she said, to listen; but if it couldn't be done at once, why, it
couldn't. After all, they could afford to wait. _He_, she said
superbly, could afford it. She ignored in her fine manner the
material side of the "Life and Letters," its absolute importance to
their poor finances, the fact that if _he_ could afford to wait,
_they_ couldn't. I don't think that view of it ever entered into her
head. The great thing, she said, was that it should be done.
And then he had to tell her that _he_ couldn't do it. He couldn't do
it at all. "That part of it, Simpson," he said, "was horrible. I
felt as if I were butchering her--butchering a lamb."
But I gathered that he had been pretty firm so far, until she broke
down and cried. For she did, poor bleeding lamb, all in a minute.
She abandoned her superb attitude and her high ground and put it
altogether on another footing. Her father hadn't been the happy,
satisfied, facilely successful person he was supposed to be. People
had been cruel to him; they had never understood; they didn't
realize that his work didn't represent him. Of course she knew (she
seems to have handled this part of it with a bold sincerity) what
he, Burton, thought about it; but he did realize _that_. He knew it
didn't do him anything like justice. He knew what lay behind it,
behind everything that he had written. It was wonderful, Burton
said, how she did that, how she made the vague phrase open up a vast
hinterland of intention, the unexplored and unexploited spirit of
him. He knew, Burton knew, how he had felt about it, how he had felt
about his fame. It hadn't been the thing he really wanted. He had
never had that. And oh, she wanted him to have it. It was the only
thing she wanted, the only thing she really cared about, the only
thing she had ever asked of Burton.
He told me frankly that she didn't seem quite sane about it. He
understood it, of course. She was broken up by the long strain of
her devotion, by his death and by the crash afterward, by the
unbearable pathos of him, of his futility, and of the menacing
oblivion. You could see that Antigone had parted with her sense of
values and distinctions, that she had lost her bearings; she was a
creature that drifted blindly on a boundless sea of compassion. She
saw her father die the ultimate death. She pleaded passionately with
Burton to hold back the shadow; to light a lamp for him; to prolong,
if it were only for a little while, his memory; to give him, out of
his own young radiance and vitality, the life beyond life that he
had desired.
Even then, so he says, he had held out, but more feebly. He said he
thought somebody else ought to do it, somebody who knew her father
better. And she said that nobody could do it, nobody did know him;
there was nobody's name that would give the value to the thing that
Burton's would. That was handsome of her, Burton said. And he seems
to have taken refuge from this dangerous praise in a modesty that
was absurd, and that he knew to be absurd in a man who had got
Lankester's "Life" on his hands. And Antigone saw through it; she
saw through it at once. But she didn't see it all; he hadn't the
heart to let her see his real reason, that he couldn't do them both.
He couldn't do Wrackham after Lankester, nor yet, for Lankester's
sake, before. And he couldn't, for his own sake, do him at any time.
It would make him too ridiculous.
And in the absence of his real reason he seems to have been
singularly ineffective. He just sat there saying anything that came
into his head except the one thing. He rather shirked this part of
it; at any rate, he wasn't keen about telling me what he'd said,
except that he'd tried to change the subject. I rather suspected him
of the extreme error of making love to Antigone in order to keep her
off it.
Finally she made a bargain with him. She said that if he did it she
would marry him whenever he liked (she had considered their
engagement broken off, though he hadn't). But (there Antigone was
adamant) if he didn't, if he cared so little about pleasing her, she
wouldn't marry him at all.
Then he said of course he did care; he would do anything to please
her, and if she was going to take a mean advantage and to put it
that way----
And of course she interrupted him and said he didn't see her point;
she wasn't putting it that way; she wasn't going to take any
advantage, mean or otherwise; it was a question of a supreme, a
sacred obligation. How _could_ she marry a man who disregarded, who
was capable of disregarding, her father's dying wish? And that she
stuck to.
I can't tell you now whether she was merely testing him, or whether
she was determined, in pure filial piety, to carry the thing
through, and saw, knowing her hold on him, that this was the way and
the only way, or whether she actually did believe that for him, too,
the obligation was sacred and supreme. Anyhow she stuck to it. Poor
Burton said he didn't think it was quite fair of her to work in that
way, but that, rather than lose her, rather than lose Antigone, he
had given in.