“The only official and recognised biography will be mine,” he whispered. “Remember that. Tell everybody. It is going to be a great book; and it will surprise some of us not a little.”
How those words came back to my mind after the event! Perhaps the most sensational biography of the last century was that by Thomas Gridd of Peter Parkinson. In public life Parkinson had passed for a remarkable man, an original thinker, a live force in ethics, a dynamic power exercised for good, and one who, to speak generally, most surely left his corner of earth better, wiser and cleaner than he found it. His privacy had of course been probed also; and it was pretty generally conceded that no better husband or father than the Professor could well be found. His amusements were pathetically innocent and high-minded; the Athenæum was his only club; when he left England upon a vacation during later life, it was in order that his family might visit the Alps, the French Exhibition of 1900 and other improving and unique phenomena of Nature and the times.
Upon a general appreciation of the dead man’s worth and virtue there burst the biography of Thomas Gridd, than which anything more sensational, outrageous and unexpected could not well be imagined. After a great parade of the necessity for Truth, of his own high motives in this matter, and of the abundant grief that his task had brought upon him, the unutterable Gridd set out upon his ruffianly way and exhibited before the amazed and incredulous vision of England the spectacle of a great reputation torn to ribbons.
Indignation raged amongst the friends of the late Professor; violent controversies burst forth in the public prints. The worst passages were denied on the one hand; while Gridd undertook to prove them to the hilt if anybody dared to have the law of him. In fact that famous romance of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” appeared to have been repeated in real life, and arising out of the Parkinson of public enterprise and honourable renown—the scientist, the philanthropist, the great sociologist—there dawned hideously within the pages of Thomas Gridd a nocturnal, subterranean and blackguard Parkinson—a man of deplorable habits and disreputable ideas—a vicious ghoul.
Of course this remarkable book sold prodigiously. Thousands of copies were purchased by the libraries alone, and a work so full of pepper and salt for the time being quite eclipsed the sale of popular fiction, of history, travel, verse, and of more amiable and conventional biography.
For myself I just lived long enough to see the scoundrel Gridd get a large fortune by his abominable book and then, in the midst of a rather promising literary career, it pleased Providence to remove me from the sub-lunar puppet-show. Overwork and a chill—but all that does not matter, as it has nothing to do with this narrative. All I need say is that I have frankly forgiven the man who finished my last novel for the press and shall meet him without prejudice if ever he comes here.
Almost the first person I met in the Elysian Fields of our order (for I am thankful to say that my modest merits entitled me to a place therein) was my old friend Professor Parkinson. He greeted me with good taste and that particular shade of sympathy proper from a happy spectre to the event of my passing in mid-career. Then, after discussing everything and everybody but himself, he said in his humble way:
“I know you will pardon my egotism, but I should like to know how the autobiography went.”
“Whose?” I asked.
“I blush to answer,” he made reply; “but I was thinking of my own.”