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............