I must confess I was monstrously disappointed when at last I could get
my hands into those barrels in the attic in which Boon had stored his
secret writings. There was more perhaps than I had expected; I do not
complain of the quantity, but of the disorder, the incompleteness, the
want of discipline and forethought.
Boon had talked so often and so convincingly of these secret books he
was writing, he had alluded so frequently to this or that great
project, he would begin so airily with "In the seventeenth chapter of
my 'Wild Asses of the Devil,'" or "I have been recasting the third
part of our 'Mind of the Race,'" that it came as an enormous shock to
me to find there was no seventeenth chapter; there was not even a
completed first chapter to the former work, and as for the latter,
there seems nothing really finished or settled at all beyond the
fragments I am now issuing, except a series of sketches of Lord
Rosebery, for the most part in a toga and a wreath, engaged in a
lettered retirement at his villa at Epsom, and labelled "Patrician
Dignity, the Last Phase"--sketches I suppress as of no present
interest--and a complete gallery of imaginary portraits (with several
duplicates) of the Academic Committee that has done so much for
British literature (the Polignac prize, for example, and Sir Henry
Newbolt's professorship) in the last four or five years. So
incredulous was I that this was all, that I pushed my inquiries from
their original field in the attic into other parts of the house,
pushed them, indeed, to the very verge of ransacking, and in that I
greatly deepened the want of sympathy already separating me from Mrs.
Boon. But I was stung by a thwarted sense of duty, and quite resolved
that no ill-advised interference should stand between me and the
publication of what Boon has always represented to me as the most
intimate productions of his mind.
Yet now the first rush of executorial emotion is over I can begin to
doubt about Boon's intention in making me his "literary executor." Did
he, after all, intend these pencilled scraps, these marginal
caricatures, and--what seems to me most objectionable--annotated
letters from harmless prominent people for publication? Or was his
selection of me his last effort to prolong what was, I think, if one
of the slightest, one also of the most sustained interests of his
life, and that was a prolonged faint jeering at my expense? Because
always--it was never hidden from me--in his most earnest moments Boon
jeered at me. I do not know why he jeered at me, it was always rather
pointless jeering and far below his usual level, but jeer he did. Even
while we talked most earnestly and brewed our most intoxicating
draughts of project and conviction, there was always this scarce
perceptible blossom and flavour of ridicule floating like a drowning
sprig of blue borage in the cup. His was indeed essentially one of
those suspended minds that float above the will and action; when at
last reality could be evaded no longer it killed him; he never really
believed nor felt the urgent need that goads my more accurate nature
to believe and do. Always when I think of us together, I feel that I
am on my legs and that he sits about. And yet he could tell me things
I sought to know, prove what I sought to believe, shape beliefs to a
conviction in me that I alone could never attain.
He took life as it came, let his fancy play upon it, selected,
elucidated, ignored, threw the result in jest or observation or
elaborate mystification at us, and would have no more of it.... He
would be earnest for a time and then break away. "The Last Trump" is
quite typical of the way in which he would turn upon himself. It sets
out so straight for magnificence; it breaks off so abominably. You
will read it.
Yet he took things more seriously than he seemed to do.
This war, I repeat, killed him. He could not escape it. It bore him
down. He did his best to disregard it. But its worst stresses caught
him in the climax of a struggle with a fit of pneumonia brought on by
a freak of bathing by moonlight--in an English October, a thing he did
to distract his mind from the tension after the Marne--and it
destroyed him. The last news they told him was that the Germans had
made their "shoot and scuttle" raid upon Whitby and Scarborough. There
was much circumstantial description in the morning's paper. They had
smashed up a number of houses and killed some hundreds of people,
chiefly women and children. Ten little children had been killed or
mutilated in a bunch on their way to school, two old ladies at a
boarding-house had had their legs smashed, and so on.
"Take this newspaper," he said, and held it out to his nurse. "Take
it," he repeated irritably, and shook it at her.
He stared at it as it receded. Then he seemed to be staring at distant
things.
"Wild Asses of the Devil," he said at last. "Oh! Wild Asses of the
Devil! I thought somehow it was a joke. It wasn't a joke. There they
are, and the world is theirs."
And he turned his face to the wall and never spoke again.