ot to the extent _he_ had them)
_and_ the incorruptible and stainless glory. But that wouldn't have
consoled him; for he wanted it both ways. Fellows like Wrackham
always do. He wasn't really happy, as a really great man might have
been, with his cucumbers and things.

He kept on saying it was easy enough to destroy a Great Name. Did
they know, did anybody know, what it cost to build one?

I said to myself that possibly Antigone might know. All I said to
him was, "Look here, we're agreed they can't do anything. When a man
has once captured and charmed the great Heart of the Public, he's
safe--in his lifetime, anyway."

Then he burst out. "His lifetime? Do you suppose he cares about his
lifetime? It's the life beyond life--the life beyond life."

It was in fact, d'you see, the "Life and Letters." He was thinking
about it then.

He went on. "They have it all their own way. He can't retort; he
can't explain; he can't justify himself. It's only when he's dead
they'll let him speak."

"Well, I mean to. That'll show 'em," he said; "that'll show 'em."

"He's thinking of it, Simpson; he's thinking of it," Burton said to
me that evening.

He smiled. He didn't know what his thinking of it was going to
mean--for him.

IV

He had been thinking of it for some considerable time. That
pilgrimage was my last--it'll be two years ago this autumn--and it
was in the spring of last year he died.

He was happy in his death. It saved him from the thing he dreaded
above everything, certainty of the ultimate extinction. It has not
come yet. We are feeling still the long reverberation of his vogue.
We miss him still in the gleam, the jest gone forever from the
papers. There is no doubt but that his death staved off the ultimate
extinction. It revived the public interest in him. It jogged the
feeble pulse of his once vast circulation. It brought the familiar
portrait back again into the papers, between the long, long columns.
And there was more laurel and a larger crowd at Brookwood than on
the day when we first met him in the churchyard at Chenies.

And then we said there had been stuff in him. We talked (in the
papers) of his "output." He had been, after all, a prodigious, a
gigantic worker. He appealed to our profoundest national instincts,
to our British admiration of sound business, of the self-made,
successful man. He might not have done anything for posterity, but
he had provided magnificently for his child and widow.