He had taken the papers—the documents—home with him; and that he might know the worst, the whole awful extent of what he was in for, he began overhauling them at once.

I went to see him late one evening and found him at it. He had been all through them once, he said, and he was going through them again. I asked him what they were like. He said nothing.

"Worse than you thought?" I asked.

Far worse. Worse than anything I could imagine. It was inconceivable, he said, what they were like. I said I supposed they were like him. I gathered from his silence that it was inconceivable what he was. That Wrackham should have no conception of where he really stood was conceivable; we knew he was like that, heaps of people were, and you didn\'t think a bit the worse of them; you could present a quite respectable "Life" of them with "Letters" by simply suppressing [Pg 206] a few salient details and softening the egoism all round. But what Burton supposed he was going to do with Wrackham, short of destroying him! You couldn\'t soften him, you couldn\'t tone him down; he wore thin in the process and vanished under your touch.

But oh, he was immense! The reminiscences were the best. Burton showed us some of them. This was one:

"It was the savage aspects of Nature that appealed to me. One of my earliest recollections is of a thunderstorm among the mountains. My nursery looked out upon the mountainside where the storm broke. My mother has told me that I cried till I made the nurse carry me to the window, and that I literally leaped in her arms for joy. I laughed at the lightning and clapped my hands at the thunder. The Genius of the Storm was my brother. I could not have been more than eleven months old."

And there was another bit that Burton said was even better.

"I have been a fighter all my life. I have had many enemies. What man who has ever done anything worth doing has not had them? But our accounts are separate, and I am willing to leave the ultimate reckoning to time." There were lots of things like that. Burton said it was like that cloak he used to wear. It would have been so noble if only he had been a little bigger.

And there was an entry in his diary that I think beat everything he\'d ever done. "May 3, 1905. Lankester died. Finished the last chapter of \'A Son of Thunder.\' Ave Frater, atque vale."

I thought there was a fine audacity about it, but Burton said there wasn\'t. Audacity implied a consciousness [Pg 207] of danger, and Wrackham had none. Burton was in despair.

"Come," I said, "there must be something in the Letters."

No, the Letters were all about himself, and there wasn\'t anything in him. You couldn\'t conceive the futility, the fatuity, the vanity—it was a disease with him.

"I couldn\'t have believed it, Simpson, if I hadn\'t seen him empty himself."

"But the hinterland?" I said. "How about the hinterland? That was what you were to have opened up."

"There wasn\'t any hinterland. He\'s opened himself up. You can see all there was of him. It\'s lamentable, Simpson, lamentable."

I said it seemed to me to be supremely funny. And he said I wouldn\'t think it funny if I were responsible for it.

"But you aren\'t," I said. "You must drop it. You can\'t be mixed up with that. The thing\'s absurd."

"Absurd? Absurdity isn\'t in it. It\'s infernal, Simpson, what this business will mean to me."

"Look here," I said. "This is all rot. You can\'t go on with it."

He groaned. "I must go on with it. If I don\'t——"

"Antigone will hang herself?"

"No. She won\'t hang herself. She\'ll chuck me. That\'s how she has me, it\'s how I\'m fixed. Can you conceive a beastlier position?"

I said I couldn\'t, and that if a girl of mine put me in it, by heaven, I\'d chuck her.

He smiled. "You can\'t chuck Antigone," he said.

I said Antigone\'s attitude was what I didn\'t understand. It was inconceivable she didn\'t know what the [Pg 208] things were like. "What do you suppose she really thinks of them?"

That was it. She had never committed herself to an opinion. "You know," he said, "she never did."

"But," I argued, "you told me yourself she said they\'d represent him. And they do, don\'t they?"

"Represent him?" He grinned in his agony. "I should think they did."

"But," I persisted, because he seemed to me to be shirking the issue, "it was her idea, wasn\'t it? that they\'d justify him, give him his chance to speak, to put himself straight with us?"

"She seems," he said meditatively, "to have taken that for granted."

"Taken it for granted? Skittles!" I said. "She must have seen they were impossible. I\'m convinced, Burton, that she\'s seen it all along; she\'s merely testing you to see how you\'d behave, how far you\'d go for her. You needn\'t worry. You\'ve gone far enough. She\'ll let you off."

"No," he said, "she\'s not testing me. I\'d have seen through her if it had been that. It\'s deadly serious. It\'s a sacred madness with her. She\'ll never let me off. She\'ll never let herself off. I\'ve told you a hundred times it\'s expiation. We can\'t get round that."

"She must be mad, indeed," I said, "not to see."

"See? See?" he cried. "It\'s my belief, Simpson, that she hasn\'t seen. She\'s been hiding her dear little head in the sand."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean," he said, "she hasn\'t looked. She\'s been afraid to."

"Hasn\'t looked?"

"Hasn\'t read the damned things. She............