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 [pg 202] 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 [pg 203] 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 [pg 204] 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; [pg 205] 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.
