The manuscript in his father's collar drawer had given him a shock. He had kept it from his mother, assuring himself that such a course was for the best. It was an odd document for his father to leave behind.
As he sat in his study a week after the funeral reading it for the first time, Aubrey grew frightened. It seemed to him that he was looking at his father--for the first time, that the man who had till now been a half enigmatic figure to him, stood at last in the room, strong and alive. The thing was a primitive type of novel--discoursive, gentle, Rabelaisian. It recounted the mental and physical adventures of an Elizabethan philosopher in a succession of unrelated episodes. There was a caress in the sentences, a simplicity in the narrative that translated itself into cunning realism.
When he had finished the reading, Aubrey stared at his father's portrait hanging over one of the book cases. The reality of the manuscript held him. He felt bewildered. It had for some three hours lifted him out of the present and immersed him in scenes and amid a company of naive ancients, starkly alive. A dormant literary sense awakened in him. The thing was a work of art, as moving, as authentic as Apuleius or Cervantes. But he would put it away. He hid it in a private drawer.
Its memory, however, grew in his mind. During his day at work the thought of the thing his father had written came to haunt him, as if it demanded something. He felt closer to it than he had ever felt to his father. There was something distasteful, though, about the intimacy.
"That was his soul," he would explain over to himself. "He lived that way inside. It was like writing a biography of secret dreams for him.
It's strange. We're all like that. Even I. There was something odd in father. Funny we never guessed. It must have been written a paragraph at a time over years and years. It was a sort of diary."
And he would recall excerpts from the book--gentle skepticisms, childish animalisms. But the tone of the thing which he could never put into words was what haunted him most. Over the naive acrobatics of plot and lively preenings of idea, an unwritten smile spread itself, a pensive tolerance that seemed to say, "Yes, yes, life has been. This tale is a curious jest. An epitaph over an empty grave. Yesterday is unreal and today is even less real. Yet here are fancies, the ghosts of sad and happy folk who never lived. And among these ghosts I once found life...."
The idea of publishing the manuscript came to Aubrey one evening when his wife returned from the theater in a curious mood. She was late for dinner and this irritated him. But her manner was even more irritating.
She was strident, flushed, gross. Her laugh as they ate made his mother frown, he observed. He said little. When they left the table an indignation toward Fanny had come to him.
He retired to his study. Fanny insisted on following him. She hovered about his chair as he tried to read, caressing him in a curious way, as if he were a child with whom she was amused. It occurred to him that she thought him a failure, that there was something condescending in her manner.
"Oh, leave me alone, please, Fanny."
"Hm! We're peevish. Dear me. Poor old Aubrey's working too hard."
"Please."
"But I want to talk to you. I want to tell you about the matinee."
"I'm not interested, Fanny. You know how I hate vaudeville."
"I love it."
"That's your privilege."
"Don't be sarcastic, Aubrey."
"I'm not. I'm just tired."
"Tired? What have you been doing?"
Despite herself she accented the you. The memory of Schroder and their day together had left her. It persisted, however, as a curious elation.
The ambiguity of words exhilarated her. She felt a sense of mastery. She wanted also to be tender toward Aubrey, to please and charm him. It was necessary to do this in order to disarm him. But he had no suspicions.
She was certain of that. Nevertheless it was necessary to make sure he had none. There were many paradoxical things necessary and most curious of them all was the necessity of showing Aubrey that she loved him. Her heart warmed toward him as it hadn't for years. She felt unaccountably grateful to Aubrey. She would have liked to sit at his side whispering love names and caressing his hair.
"Well, for one thing, I've been writing."
He looked at her calmly.
"Writing? You mean books? Why, I didn't know!"
Aubrey smiled, recovering a superiority toward her. But his heart grew heavy almost simultaneously. She had thrown her arms about him and was exclaiming, "Oh, I'm so glad. I'm so glad you're writing again, Aubrey darling. I've wanted you to so much."
He pushed her away slowly. She stood pouting.
"Now I can see where I take a back seat," she sighed. "Yes sir, you won't have time for me at all. But I don't care. As long as you're happy, darling, I'm delighted. I want you to be happy and I know it makes you happy to write."
When she left the room Aubrey remained frowning after her. He would surprise her. He would surprise them all. He would publish the manuscript under his own name. It would create a sensation. It would bring him back in the public eye more glorified than he had been in his literary heyday.
In a few days the idea had grown to obliterating proportions. For a time he abandoned the contemplation of the inner Aubrey--the gleaming-eyed Thunderer. This other was nearer reality--an Aubrey hymned as a rejuvenated literary figure. But he hesitated. His indecision resulted in a predicament. He had been boasting cautiously of his new work, letting out hints as to its character. There was Cressy, a literary critic and a member of the club where he lunched. He had talked to him about it.
"I'm surprised myself," he explained. "I was rather uncertain whether I could come back. But the rest was evidently just what I needed. The book isn't at all in my old style. More direct, sincere and entirely simple.
You'll like it."
Cressy became important in Aubrey's predicament. Cressy was a man whom Aubrey identified as "the more discriminating public." He yearned for the approval of this public. And as his decision to have his father's manuscript printed under his own name grew, Aubrey sought the critic out. It was pleasant to boast to Cressy, to feel oneself part of the superior literary world Cressy inhabited.
Cressy had left the university with the determination to write. He had, however, developed into a scholar, using a knowledge of Greek and Latin to acquire a baggage of classical erudition. For ten years he had been contributing literary essays to magazines and newspapers. In these he wagged his head sorrowfully over the decline of letters. He presented an impregnable front to all new writers. The names of new novelists in the book lists irritated him precisely as the names of new celebrities in the society columns had once irritated Mrs. Basine. He resented them as intruders and focused a pedantic wrath on them.
In his own mind he pictured himself as being in a continual state of revolt against the inferiority of modern literature. His attacks, however, were entirely a defensive gesture. His literary point of view was inspired by a heroic desire to annihilate contemporary literature.
Contemporary books were an insult and a barrier to his egoism. He battled against them. His struggle was the quixotic effort to assert the superiority of his erudition. New novels, new poetries, new philosophies were a conspiracy to minimize him and he went after them with the zeal of one engaged in tracking criminals to their lair.
At forty-five he was a stern-faced man with a greying mustache, heavy glasses behind which gleamed indignant eyes. He was impressive looking.
People who never read his fulminations still felt a high regard for his scholarship. He was fearless in the pronunciation of French, Latin and Greek names and invariably functioned as arbiter in all disputes concerning classical quotations and allusions.
His friendship with Aubrey was based chiefly on the certainty he felt that Aubrey was an inferior writer. He was not part of the conspiracy aimed at the minimization of Cressy, the scholar.
"Well, I'm glad to hear that, Aubrey," he congratulated his friend.
"Very glad. Writing is a delight few people understand these days."
"I know. And I think you'll be interested particularly, John, because the story is of Elizabethan England. I've modeled the technique on Apuleius and the other later Roman tale-tellers."
"Indeed!" Cressy bristled. "That should be interesting."
"I'd like to have your opinion of it, John. I've always valued what you say, but this time more than ever. Because I feel I've entered your field and you're guarding the fences and all that."
Cressy's face relaxed. Quite right. His field. And if the book was any good he could leap forward as its authentic champion and through it denounce the base modernism of the day. But how did Aubrey who was a superficial dabbler come by Elizabethan England?
Aubrey promised to produce the manuscript within a few days and left the club. A July sun hammered at the streets. The heat added to his inward discomfort. It was too hot to think. Yet it was necessary to think.
Something was piling up and unless he thought it out clearly, it would fall on him.
He had made up his mind to publish his father's manuscript as his own.
But in the weeks that had passed he had become aware that he was not going to carry out his intention. There were things that kept him from it. A morbid sense that his father was watching him had grown in his mind. He was afraid. At night in bed he conducted himself with a scrupulous politeness toward his wife, certain that his every action was being observed by his father.
There was another restriction. The appearance of the manuscript with his name to it would be a distasteful anti-climax. He had lost himself so long and so ardently in the creation of an inner Aubrey--the hawk-faced Isaiah redeeming men--that the prospect of a frankly sensual volume signed by Aubrey Gilchrist made him uncomfortable.
In the face of the realities that would ensue--the praise for instance, of the healthy animalism of the book--he would have to abandon the secret characterization that had grown almost an essential of his life.
He could not go ahead redeeming men and lifting them toward a life of asceticism while people were talking and writing about the fact that Aubrey Gilchrist was a sensual realist. And finally there was a feeling of dishonesty, inseparable from his fear of his father, but adding its weight to the restrictions.
As the feeling that he would never dare to publish the manuscript approached a certainty, Aubrey sought to force his own hand by telling his friends of the book, boasting of it and promising its early appearance. In this way he dimly hoped to make it socially necessary for him to produce the volume and that finally the social necessity of living up to his announcements would overpower the inner restraints. He was desperately throwing up bridges in the hope of being driven across them.
The dilemma slipped out of his mind as he walked toward his home. It was distasteful. The finding of the manuscript had, in fact, upset him more than anything which had ever happened. As he neared his residence a wilted sensation came into his thought. He had been trying eagerly to recover the full image of the inner Aubrey and derive a few hours of surcease in the easy contemplation of that great hero's triumphs. But now it occurred to him that Judge Smith and John Mackay, his partner, Fanny and her relatives and all his world were buzzing with gossip about his return to literature. The dilemma crawled wearily back into his mind.