I didn't see Wrackham for a long time, but I heard of him; I heard
all I wanted, for Burton was by no means so tender to him as he used
to be. And I heard of poor Antigone. I gathered that she wasn't
happy, that she was losing some of her splendor and vitality. In all
Burton's pictures of her you could see her droop.
This went on for nearly three years, and by that time Burton, as you
know, had made a name for himself that couldn't be ignored. He was
also making a modest, a rather painfully modest income. And one
evening he burst into my rooms and told me it was all right.
Antigone had come round. Wrackham hadn't, but that didn't matter.
Antigone had said she didn't care. They might have to wait a bit,
but that didn't matter either. The great thing was that she had
accepted him, that she had had the courage to oppose her father. You
see, they scored because, as long as Wrackham had his eye on Burton,
he didn't forbid him the house.
I went down with him soon after that by Wrackham's invitation. I'm
not sure that he hadn't his eye on me; he had his eye on everybody
in those days when, you know, his vogue, his tremendous vogue, was
just perceptibly on the decline.
I found him changed, rather pitiably changed, and in low spirits.
"They"--the terrible, profane young men--had been "going for him"
again, as he called it.
Of course when they really went for him he was all right. He could
get over it by saying that they did it out of sheer malevolence,
that they were jealous of his success, that a writer cannot be great
without making enemies, and that perhaps he wouldn't have known how
great he was if he hadn't made any. But they didn't give him much
opportunity. They were too clever for that. They knew exactly how to
flick him on the raw. It wasn't by the things they said so much as
by the things they deliberately didn't say; and they could get at
him any time, easily, by praising other people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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