he didn't die. not then, not all at once. he had an illness afterward that sent his circulation up to i don't know what, but he didn't die of it. he knew his business far too well to die then. we had five blessed years of him. nor could we have done with less. words can't describe the joy he was to us, nor what he would have been but for antigone.
i ought to tell you that he recovered his spirits wonderfully on our way back from chenies. he had mistaken our attentions to antigone for interest in him, and he began to unbend, to unfold himself, to expand gloriously. it was as if he felt that the removal of ford lankester had left him room.
he proposed that burton and i should make a pilgrimage some day to wildweather hall. he called it a pilgrimage—to the shrine, you understand.
well, we made it. we used to make many pilgrimages, but burton made more than i.
the sacred place, you remember, was down in east [pg 185] devon. he'd built himself a modern tudor mansion—if you know what that is—there and ruined the most glorious bit of the coast between seaton and sidmouth. it stood at the head of a combe looking to the sea. they'd used old stone for the enormous front of it, and really, if he'd stuck it anywhere else, it might have been rather fine. but it was much too large for the combe. why, when all the lights were lit in it you could see it miles out to sea, twinkling away like the line of the brighton parade. it was one immense advertisement of charles wrackham, and must have saved his publishers thousands. his "grounds" went the whole length of the combe, and up the hill on the east side of it where his cucumber frames blazed in the sun. and besides his cucumbers (anybody can have cucumbers) he had a yacht swinging in portland harbor (at least he had that year when he was at his height). and he had two motor-cars and a wood that he kept people out of, and a great chunk of beach. he couldn't keep them off that, and they'd come miles, from torquay and exeter, to snapshot him when he bathed.
the regular approach to him, for pilgrims, was extraordinarily impressive. and not only the "grounds," but the whole interior of the tudor mansion, must have been planned with a view to that alone. it was all staircases and galleries and halls, black oak darknesses and sudden clear spaces and beautiful chintzy, silky rooms—lots of them, for mrs. wrackham—and books and busts and statues everywhere. and these were only his outer courts; inside them was his sanctuary, his library, and inside that, divided from it by curtains, was the innermost, the shrine itself, and inside the shrine, veiled by his curtains, was charles wrackham. [pg 186]
as you came through, everything led up to him, as it were, by easy stages and gradations. he didn't burst on you cruelly and blind you. you waited a minute or two in the library, which was all what he called "silent presences and peace." the silent presences, you see, prepared you for him. and when, by gazing on the busts of shakespeare and cervantes, your mind was turned up to him, then you were let in. over that tudor mansion, and the whole place, you may say for miles along the coast, there brooded the shadow of charles wrackham's greatness. if we hadn't been quite so much oppressed by that we might have enjoyed the silent presences and the motor-cars and things, and the peace that was established there because of him. and we did enjoy antigone and mrs. wrackham.
it's no use speculating what he would have been if he'd never written anything. you cannot detach him from his writings, nor would he have wished to be detached. i suppose he would still have been the innocent, dependent creature that he was: fond, very fond of himself, but fond also of his home and of his wife and daughter. it was his domesticity, described, illustrated, exploited in a hundred papers, that helped to endear charles wrackham to his preposterous public. it was part of the immense advertisement. his wife's gowns, the sums he spent on her, the affection that he notoriously lavished on her, were part of it.
i'll own that at one time i had a great devotion to mrs. wrackham (circumstances have somewhat strained it since). she was a woman of an adorable plumpness, with the remains of a beauty which must have been pink and golden once. and she would have been absolutely simple but for the touch of assurance that was given her by her position as the [pg 187] publicly loved wife of a great man. every full, round line of her face and figure declared (i don't like to say advertised) her function. she existed in and for charles wrackham. you saw that her prominent breast fairly offered itself as a pillow for his head. her soft hands suggested the perpetual stroking and soothing of his literary vanity, her face the perpetual blowing of an angelic trumpet in his praise. her entire person, incomparably soft, yet firm, was a buffer that interposed itself automatically between wrackham and the bludgeonings of fate. as for her mind, i know nothing about it except that it was absolutely simple. she was a woman of one idea—two ideas, i should say, charles wrackham the man, and charles wrackham the great novelist.
she could separate them only so far as to marvel at his humanity because of his divinity, how he could stoop, how he could condescend, how he could lay it all aside and be delightful as we saw him—"like a boy, mr. simpson, like a boy!"
it was our second day, sunday, and wrackham had been asleep in his shrine all afternoon while she piloted us in the heat about the "grounds." i can see her now, dear plump lady, under her pink sunshade, saying all this with a luminous, enchanting smile. we were not to miss him; we were to look at him giving up his precious, his inconceivably precious time, laying himself out to amuse, to entertain us—"just giving himself—giving himself all the time." and then, lest we might be uplifted, she informed us, still with the luminous, enchanting smile, that mr. wrackham was like that to "everybody, mr. simpson; everybody!"
she confided a great many things to us that afternoon. for instance, that she was greatly troubled by what she called "the ill-natured attacks on mr. wrackham [pg 188] in the papers," the "things" that "they" said about him (it was thus vaguely that she referred to some of our younger and profaner critics). she was very sweet and amiable and charitable about it. i believe she prayed for them. she was quite sure, dear lady, that "they" wouldn't do it if "they" knew how sensitive he was, how much it hurt him. and of course it didn't really hurt him. he was above it all.
i remember i began that sunday by cracking up burton to her, just to see how she would take it, and perhaps for another reason. antigone had carried him off to the strawberry-bed, where i gathered from their sounds of happy laughter that they were feeding each other with the biggest ones. for the moment, though not, i think, afterward, antigone's mother was blind and deaf to what was going on in the strawberry-bed. i spoke to her of burton and his work, of the essay on ford lankester, of the brilliant novel he had just published, his first; and i even went so far as to speak of the praise it had received; but i couldn't interest her in burton. i believe she always, up to the very last, owed burton a grudge on account of his novels; not so much because he had so presumptuously written them as because he had been praised for writing them. i don't blame her, neither did he, for this feeling. it was inseparable from the piety with which she regarded charles wrackham as a great figure in literature, a sacred and solitary figure.
i don't know how i got her off him and on to antigone. i may have asked her point-blank to what extent antigone was her father's daughter. the luminous and expansive lady under the sunshade was a little less luminous and expansive when we came to angelette, as she called her; but i gathered then, and later, that antigone was a dedicated child, a child [pg 189] set apart and consecrated to the service of her father. it was not, of course, to be expected that she should inherit any of his genius; mrs. wrackham seemed to think it sufficiently wonderful that she should have developed the intelligence that fitted her to be his secretary. i was not to suppose it was because he couldn't afford a secretary (the lady laughed as she said this; for you see how absurd it was, the idea of charles wrackham not being able to afford anything). it was because they both felt that antigone ought not to be, as she put it, "overshadowed" by him; he wished that she should be associated, intimately associated, with his work; that the child should have her little part in his glory. it was not only her share of life which he took and so to speak put in the bank for her, but an investment for antigone in the big business of his immortality. there she was, there she always would be, associated with charles wrackham and his work.
she sighed under the sunshade. "that child," she said, "can do more for him, mr. simpson, than i can."
i could see that, though the poor lady didn't know it, she suffered a subtle sorrow and temptation. if she hadn't been so amiable, if she hadn't been so good, she would have been jealous of antigone.
she assured us that only his wife and daughter knew what he really was.
we wondered, did antigone know? she made no sign of distance or dissent, but somehow she didn't seem to belong to him. there was something remote and irrelevant about her; she didn't fit into the advertisement. and in her remoteness and irrelevance she remained inscrutable. she gave no clue to what she really thought of him. when "they" went for him she soothed him. she spread her warm angel's wing, [pg 190] and wrapped him from the howling blast. but, as far as we could make out, she never committed herself to an opinion. all her consolations went to the tune of "they say. what say they? let them say." which might have applied to anybody. we couldn't tell whether, like her mother, she believed implicitly or whether she saw through him.
she certainly saw beyond him, or she couldn't have said the things she did—you remember?—at ford lankester's funeral. but she had been overwrought then, and that clear note had been wrung from her by the poignancy of the situation. she never gave us anything like that again.
and she was devoted to him—devoted with passion. there couldn't be any sort of doubt about it.
sometimes i wondered even then if it wasn't almost entirely a passion of pity. for she must have known. burton always declared she knew. at least in the beginning he did; afterwards he was not clear about it any more than i was then. he said that her knowledge, her vision, of him was complete and that her pity for him was unbearable. he said that she would have given anything to have seen him as her mother saw him and as he saw himself, and that all her devotion to him, to it, his terrible work, was to make up to him for not seeing, for seeing as she saw. it was consecration, if you like; but it was expiation too, the sacrifice for the sin of an unfilial clarity.
and the tenderness she put into it!
wrackham never knew how it protected him. it regularly spoilt our pleasure in him. we couldn't—when we thought of antigone—get the good out of him we might have done. we had to be tender to him, too. i think antigone liked us for our tenderness. certainly she liked burton—oh, from the very first.
