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."