The Return of the Prodigal Part 35

It was because of Antigone that I went up and spoke to him, and did it (I like to think I did it now) with reverence. He seemed, in spite of the reverence, to be a little dashed at seeing _me_ there.

His idea, evidently, was that if so obscure a person as I could be present, it diminished _his_ splendor and significance.

He inquired (for hope was immortal in him) whether I was there for the papers? I said no, I wasn't there for anything. I had come down with Burton, because we---- But he interrupted me.

"What's _he_ doing here?" he said. There was the funniest air of resentment and suspicion about him.

I reminded him that Burton's "Essay on Ford Lankester" had given him a certain claim. Besides, Mrs. Lankester had asked him. He was one of the few she had asked. I really couldn't tell him she had asked me.

His gloom was awful enough when he heard that Burton had been asked.

You see, the fact glared, and even he must have felt it--that he, with his tremendous, his horrific vogue, had not achieved what Grevill Burton had by his young talent. He had never known Ford Lankester. Goodness knows I didn't mean to rub it into him; but there it was.

We had moved away from the edge of the grave (I think he didn't like to be seen standing there with me) and I begged him to introduce me to his daughter. He did so with an alacrity which I have since seen was anything but flattering to me, and left me with her while he made what you might call a dead set at Furnival. He had had his eye on him and on the other representatives of the press all the time he had been talking to me. Now he made straight for him; when Furnival edged off he followed; when Furnival dodged he doubled; he was so afraid that Furnival might miss him. As if Furnival could have missed him, as if in the face of Wrackham's vogue his paper would have let him miss him. It would have been as much as Furny's place on it was worth.

Of course that showed that Wrackham ought never to have been there; but there he was; and when you think of the unspeakable solemnity and poignancy of the occasion it really is rather awful that the one vivid impression I have left of it is of Charles Wrackham; Charles Wrackham under the yew tree; Charles Wrackham leaning up against a pillar (he remained standing during the whole of the service in the church) with his arm raised and his face hidden in his cloak. The att.i.tude this time was immense. Furnival (Furny was really dreadful) said it was "Brother mourning Brother." But I caught him--I caught him three times--just raising his near eyelid above his drooped arm and peeping at Furnival and the other pressmen to see that they weren't missing him.

It must have been then that Burton saw, though he says now he didn't. He won't own up to having seen him. We had hidden ourselves behind the mourners in the chancel and he swears that he didn't see anybody but Antigone, and that he only saw her because, in spite of her efforts to hide too, she stood out so; she was so tall, so white and golden. Her head was bowed with--well, with grief, I think, but also with what I've no doubt now was a sort of shame. I wondered: Did she share her father's illusion? Or had she seen through it? Did she see the awful absurdity of the draped figure at her side? Did she realize the gulf that separated him from the undying dead? Did she know that we couldn't have stood his being there but for our certainty that somewhere above us and yet with us, from his high seat among the Undying, Ford Lankester was looking on and enjoying more than we could enjoy--with a divine, immortal mirth--the rich, amazing comedy of him. Charles Wrackham there--at _his_ funeral!

But it wasn't till it was all over that he came out really strong.

We were sitting together in the parlor of the village inn, he and Antigone, and Grevill Burton and Furnival and I, with an hour on our hands before our train left. I had ordered tea on Antigone's account, for I saw that she was famished. They had come down from Devons.h.i.+re that day. They had got up at five to catch the early train from Seaton Junction, and then they'd made a dash across London for the 12.30 from Marylebone; and somehow they'd either failed or forgotten to lunch. Antigone said she hadn't cared about it. Anyhow, there she was with us. We were all feeling that relief from nervous tension which comes after a funeral. Furnival had his stylo out and was jotting down a few impressions. Wrackham had edged up to him and was sitting, you may say, in Furny's pocket while he explained to us that his weak health would have prevented him from coming, but that _he had to come_. He evidently thought that the funeral couldn't have taken place without him--not with any decency, you know. And then Antigone said a thing for which I loved her instantly.

"_I_ oughtn't to have come," she said. "I felt all the time I oughtn't. I hadn't any right."

That drew him.

"You had your right," he said. "You are your father's daughter."

He brooded somberly.

"It was not," he said, "what I had expected--that meager following.

Who _were_ there? Not two--not three--and there should have been an army of us."

He squared himself and faced the invisible as if he led the van.

That and his att.i.tude drew Burton down on to him.

"Was there ever an army," he asked dangerously, "of 'us'?"

Wrackham looked at Burton (it was the first time he'd taken the smallest notice of him) with distinct approval, as if the young man had suddenly shown more ability than he had given him credit for.

But you don't suppose he'd seen the irony in him. Not he!

"You're right," he said. "Very right. All the same, there ought to have been more there besides Myself."

There was a perfectly horrible silence, and then Antigone's voice came through it, pure and fine and rather slow.

"There couldn't be. There couldn't really be anybody--there--_at all_. He stood alone."

And with her wonderful voice there went a look, a look of intelligence, as wonderful, as fine and pure. It went straight to Burton. It was humble, and yet there was a sort of splendid pride about it. And there was no revolt, mind you, no disloyalty in it; the beauty of the thing was that it didn't set her father down; it left him where he was, as high as you please, as high as his vogue could lift him. Ford Lankester was beyond him only because he was beyond them all.

And yet we wondered how he'd take it.

He took it as if Antigone had been guilty of a social blunder; as if her behavior had been in some way painful and improper. That's to say he took no notice of it at all beyond s.h.i.+fting his seat a little so as to screen her. And then he spoke--exclusively to us.

"I came," he said, "partly because I felt that, for all Lankester's greatness, _this_--" (his gesture indicated us all sitting there in our mourning)--"_this_ was the last of him. It's a question whether he'll ever mean much to the next generation. There's no doubt that he limited his public--wilfully. He alienated the many. And, say what you like, the judgment of posterity is not the judgment of the few." There was a faint murmur of dissent (from Furnival), but Wrackham's voice, which had gathered volume, rolled over it. "Not for the novelist. Not for the painter of contemporary life."

He would have kept it up interminably on those lines and on that scale, but that Antigone created a diversion (I think she did it on purpose to screen him) by getting up and going out softly into the porch of the inn.

Burton followed her there.

You forgive many things to Burton. I have had to forgive his cutting me out with Antigone. He _says_ that they talked about nothing but Ford Lankester out there, and certainly as I joined them I heard Antigone saying again, "I oughtn't to have come. I only came because I adored him." I heard Burton say, "And you never knew him?" and Antigone, "No, how _could_ I?"

And then I saw him give it back to her with his young radiance.

"It's a pity. He would have adored _you_."

He always says it was Ford Lankester that did it.

The next thing Furnival's article came out. Charles Wrackham's name was in it all right, and poor Antigone's. I'm sure it made her sick to see it there. Furny had been very solemn and decorous in his article; but in private his profanity was awful. He said it only remained now for Charles Wrackham to die.

II

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 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 cuc.u.mber frames blazed in the sun. And besides his cuc.u.mbers (anybody can have cuc.u.mbers) 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 s.p.a.ces 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.

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, ill.u.s.trated, exploited in a hundred papers, that helped to endear Charles Wrackham to his preposterous public. It was part of the immense advertis.e.m.e.nt. 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 (circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.surance that was given her by her position as the 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 in the papers," the "things" that "They"