He had taken the papers--the documents--home with him; and that he
might know the worst, the whole awful extent of what he was in for,
he began overhauling them at once.
I went to see him late one evening and found him at it. He had been
all through them once, he said, and he was going through them again.
I asked him what they were like. He said nothing.
"Worse than you thought?" I asked.
Far worse. Worse than anything I could imagine. It was
inconceivable, he said, what they were like. I said I supposed they
were like _him_. I gathered from his silence that it was
inconceivable what _he_ was. That Wrackham should have no conception
of where he really stood was conceivable; we knew he was like that,
heaps of people were, and you didn't think a bit the worse of them;
you could present a quite respectable "Life" of them with "Letters"
by simply suppressing a few salient details and softening the
egoism all round. But what Burton supposed he was going to do with
Wrackham, short of destroying him! You couldn't soften him, you
couldn't tone him down; he wore thin in the process and vanished
under your touch.
But oh, he was immense! The reminiscences were the best. Burton
showed us some of them. This was one:
"It was the savage aspects of Nature that appealed to me. One of my
earliest recollections is of a thunderstorm among the mountains. My
nursery looked out upon the mountainside where the storm broke. My
mother has told me that I cried till I made the nurse carry me to
the window, and that I literally leaped in her arms for joy. I
laughed at the lightning and clapped my hands at the thunder. The
Genius of the Storm was my brother. I could not have been more than
eleven months old."
And there was another bit that Burton said was even better.
"I have been a fighter all my life. I have had many enemies. What
man who has ever done anything worth doing has not had them? But our
accounts are separate, and I am willing to leave the ultimate
reckoning to time." There were lots of things like that. Burton said
it was like that cloak he used to wear. It would have been so noble
if only he had been a little bigger.
And there was an entry in his diary that I think beat everything
he'd ever done. "May 3, 1905. Lankester died. Finished the last
chapter of 'A Son of Thunder.' _Ave Frater, atque vale._"
I thought there was a fine audacity about it, but Burton said there
wasn't. Audacity implied a consciousness of danger, and Wrackham
had none. Burton was in despair.
"Come," I said, "there must be something in the Letters."
No, the Letters were all about himself, and there wasn't anything in
_him_. You couldn't conceive the futility, the fatuity, the
vanity--it was a disease with him.
"I couldn't have believed it, Simpson, if I hadn't seen him empty
himself."
"But the hinterland?" I said. "How about the hinterland? That was
what you were to have opened up."
"There wasn't any hinterland. He's opened himself up. You can see
all there was of him. It's lamentable, Simpson, lamentable."
I said it seemed to me to be supremely funny. And he said I wouldn't
think it funny if I were responsible for it.
"But you aren't," I said. "You must drop it. You can't be mixed up
with _that_. The thing's absurd."
"Absurd? Absurdity isn't in it. It's infernal, Simpson, what this
business will mean to me."
"Look here," I said. "This is all rot. You can't go on with it."