 CHAPTER 1 What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by himself quite without intention, spoken as they lingered and slowly moved together after their renewal of acquaintance. He had been conveyed by friends an hour or two before to the house at which she was staying, the party of visitors at the other house, of whom he was one, and thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that he was lost in the crowd, had been invited over to luncheon. There had been after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of the original motive, a view of whether end itself, and the fine things, intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts that made the place almost famous, and the great rooms were so numerous that guests could wander at their will, hang back from the principal group, and in cases where they took such matters with the last seriousness, give themselves up to mysterious appreciations and measurements. There were persons to be observed, singly or in couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners with their hands on their knees and their heads nodding quite as with the emphasis of an excited sense of smell. When they were two, they either mingled their sounds of ecstasy, or melted into silences of even deeper import, so that there were aspects of the occasion that gave it for Marcher much the air of the look round, previous to a sale highly advertised, that excites, or quenches as may be, the dream of acquisition. The dream of acquisition at whether end would have had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the presence of those who knew too much, and by that of those who knew nothing. The great rooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him that he needed some straying apart to feel in a proper relation with them, though this impulse was not as happened, like the gloating of some of his companions, to be compared to the movements of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a direction that was not to have been calculated. It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder yet not quite a remembrance, as they sat much separated at a very long table, had begun merely by troubling him rather pleasantly. It affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, as a continuation, but didn't know what it continued, which was an interest or an amusement the greater as he was also somehow aware, yet without a direct sign from her, that the young woman herself hadn't lost the thread. She hadn't lost it, but she wouldn't give it back to him, he saw, without some putting forth of his hand for it. And he not only saw that, but saw several things more, things odd enough in light of the fact that, at the moment, some accident of grouping brought them face to face. He was still merely fumbling with the idea that any contact between them in the past would have had no importance. If it had had no importance, he scarcely knew why his actual impression of her should so seem to have so much. The answer to which, however, was that in such a life as they all appeared to be leading for the moment, one could but take things as they came. He was satisfied, without in the least being able to say why, that this young lady might roughly have ranked in the house as a poor relation. He had also that she was not there on a brief visit, but was more or less a part of the establishment, almost a working, a remunerated part. Didn't she enjoy at periods a protection that she paid for by helping, among other services, to show the place and explain it, deal with the tiresome people, answer questions about the dates of the building, the styles of the furniture, the authorship of the pictures, the favorite haunts of the ghost? It wasn't that she looked as if you could have given her shillings. It was impossible to look less so. Yet when she finally drifted toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever so much older, older than when he had seen her before, it might have been as an effect of her guessing that he had, within the couple of hours, devoted more imagination to her than to all the others put together, and had thereby penetrated to a kind of truth that the others were too stupid for. She was there on harder terms than any one. She was there as a consequence of things suffered one way and another in the interval of years, and she remembered him very much as she was remembered, only a good deal better. By the time they had last thus came to speech, they were alone in one of the rooms, remarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney-place, out of which their friends had passed, and the charm of it was that even before they had spoken they had practically arranged with each other to stay behind for talk. The charm happily was in other things too, partly in their being scarce a spot at weather end without something to stay behind for. It was in the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned, the way the red light, breaking at the clothes from under a low somber sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wane scots, old tapestry, old gold, old color. It was most of all perhaps in the way she came to him as if, since she had been turned on to deal with the simpler sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole thing down, just take her mild attention for a part of her general business. As soon as he heard her voice, however, the gap was filled up and the missing link supplied. The slight irony he divined in her attitude lost its advantage. He almost jumped at it to get there before her. I met you years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about it. She confessed to disappointment. She had been so sure he didn't. And to prove how well he did, he began to pour forth the particular recollections that popped up as he called for them. Her face and her voice all at his service now worked the miracle, the impression operating like the torch of a lamp-lighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas jets. Marcher flattered himself. The illumination was brilliant. Yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him with amusement than in his haste to make everything right. He had got most things rather wrong. It hadn't been at Rome. It had been at Naples. And it hadn't been eight years before. It had been more nearly ten. She hadn't been, either, with her uncle and aunt, but with her mother and brother. In addition to which, it was not with the pambles he had been, but with the boyers, coming down in their company from Rome. A point on which she insisted, a little to his confusion, and has to which she had her evidence in hand. The boyers she had known, but didn't know the pambles, though she had heard of them, and it was the people he was with, who had made them acquainted. The incident of the thunderstorm that had raged round them with such violence as to drive them for refuge into an excavation. This incident had not occurred at the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occasion when they had been present there at an important find. He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, though the moral of them was, she pointed out, that he really didn't remember the least thing about her. And he only felt it as a drawback, that when all was made strictly historic there didn't appear much of anything left. They lingered together still, she neglecting her office, for from the moment he was so clever she had no proper right to him. And both neglecting the house, just waiting, as to see if a memory or two more, wouldn't again breathe on them. It hadn't taken them many minutes, after all, to put down on the table like the cards of a pack, those that constituted their respective hands. Only what came out was that the pack was unfortunately not perfect, that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them, naturally, no more than it had. It had made them anciently meet, her at twenty, him at twenty-five, but nothing was so strange, they seemed to say to each other, because that, while so occupied, it hadn't done a little more for them. They looked at each other as with the feeling of an occasion missed. The present would have been so much better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn't been so stupidly meager. There weren't, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in coming to pass between them. Simplicities of youth, simplicities of freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too deeply buried, too deeply, didn't it seem, to sprout after so many years? Marcher could only feel he ought to have rendered her some service, saved her from a capsized boat in the bay, or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched from her cab in the streets of Naples, by a Lazzarone with a stiletto. Or it would have been nice if he could have taken with fever all alone at his hotel, and she could have come to look after him, to write to his people, to drive him out in convalescence. Then they would be in possession of the something or other that their actual show seemed to lack. It yet somehow presented itself this show as too good to be spoiled, so that they were reduced for a few minutes more to wondering a little helplessly why, since they seemed to know a certain number of the same people, their reunion had been so long averted. They didn't use that name for it, but their delay from minute to minute to join the others was a kind of confession that they didn't quite want it to be a failure. Their attempted supposition of reasons for their not having met, but showed how little they knew of each other. There came in fact a moment when Marcher felt a positive pang. It was vain to pretend she was an old friend, for all the communities were wanting, in spite of which it was as an old friend that he saw she would have suited him. He had knew ones enough, was surrounded by them, for instance, in the stage of the other house. As a new one he probably wouldn't have so much as noticed her. He would have liked to invent something, get her to make believe with him that some passage of a romantic or critical kind had originally occurred. He was really almost reaching out in imagination, as against time, for something that would do, and saying to himself that if it didn't come, this sketch of a fresh start would show for quite awkwardly bungled. They would separate, and now for no second or no third chance. They would have tried and not succeeded. Then it was, just at the turn as he afterwards made it out to himself that, everything else failing, she herself decided to take up the case, and as it were, save the situation. He felt as soon as she spoke, that she had been consciously keeping back what she said and hoping to get on without it. A scruple in her that immensely touched him when, by the end of three or four minutes more, he was able to measure it. What she brought out at any rate quite cleared the air, and supplied the link. The link it was so odd, he should frivolously have managed to lose. You know, you told me something I've never forgotten, and that again and again has made me think of you since. It was that tremendously hot day when we went to Sorrento across the bay for the breeze. What I allude to was what you said to me on the way back, as we sat under the awning of the boat enjoying the cool. Have you forgotten? He had forgotten, and was even more surprised than ashamed. But the great thing was that he saw in this no vulgar reminder of any sweet speech. The vanity of women had long memories, but she was making no claim on him of a compliment or a mistake. With another woman, a totally different one, he might have feared the recall possibly even some imbecile offer. So in having to say that he had indeed forgotten, he was conscious rather of a loss than of a gain. He already saw an interest in the matter of her mention. I try to think, but I give it up. Yet I remember the Sorrento day. I'm not very sure you do, may Bartram after a moment said. And I'm not very sure I ought to want you to. It's dreadful to bring a person back at any time to what he was ten years before. If you've lived away from it, she smiled, so much the better. Ah, if you haven't, why should I? He asked. Lived away you mean from what I myself was? From what I was. I was, of course, an ass, Marcher went on. But I would rather know from you just the sort of ass I was than the moment you have something in your mind not know anything. Still, however, she hesitated. But if you've completely ceased to be that sort? Why, I can then all the more bear to know. Besides perhaps I haven't. Perhaps. Yet, if you haven't, she added, I should suppose you'd remember. Not indeed that I, in the least, connect with my impression the invidious name you use. If I had only thought you foolish, she explained, the thing I speak of wouldn't so have remained with me. It was about yourself. She waited, as if it might come to him. But as only meeting her eyes in wonder he gave no sign. She burnt her ships. Has it ever happened? Then it was, that while he continued to stare, a light broke for him, and the blood slowly came to his face, which began to burn with recognition. Do you mean I told you? But he faltered, lest what came to him shouldn't be right, lest he should only give himself away. It was something about yourself that it was natural one shouldn't forget. That is, if one remembered you at all. That's why I ask you, she smiled. If the thing you then spoke of has ever come to pass, oh, then he saw. But he was lost in wonder, and found himself embarrassed. This he also saw made her sorry for him, as if her illusion had been a mistake. It took him but a moment, however, to feel it hadn't been, much as it had been a surprise. After the first little shock of it, her knowledge, on the contrary, began, even if rather strangely, to taste sweet to him. She was the only other person in the world then who would have it, and she had had it all these years, while the fact of his having so breathed his secret had unaccountably faded from him. No wonder they couldn't have met as if nothing had happened. I judge, he finally said, that I know what you mean. Only I had strangely enough lost any sense of having taken you so far into my confidence. Is it because you've taken so many others as well? I've taken nobody, not a creature since then, so that I am the only person who knows, the only person in the world. Well, she quickly replied, I myself have never spoken, I've never, never repeated of you what you told me. She looked at him so that he perfectly believed her. Their eyes met over it in such a way that he was without a doubt, and I never will. She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost excessive, put him at ease about her possible derision. How the whole question was a new luxury to him, that is, from the moment she was in possession. If she didn't take the sarcastic view, she clearly took the sympathetic, and that was what he had had in all the long time from no one whom so ever. What he felt was that he couldn't at present have begun to tell her, and yet could profit perhaps exquisitely by the accident of having done so of old. Please don't, then, we're just right as it is. Oh, I am, she laughed, if you are. To which she added, then do you still feel in the same way? It was impossible he shouldn't take to himself that she was really interested, though it all kept coming as a perfect surprise. He had thought of himself so long as abominably alone, and lo, he wasn't alone a bit. He hadn't been, it appeared, for an hour since those moments on the Sorrento boat. It was she who had been, he seemed to see, as he looked at her, she who had been made so, by the graceless fact of his laps of fidelity. To tell her what he had told her, what had it been but to ask something of her, something that she had given in her charity, about his having by a remembrance, by a return of the spirit, failing another encounter, so much as thanked her. What he had asked of her had been simply at first not to laugh at him. She had beautifully not done so for ten years, and she was not doing so now. So he had endless gratitude to make up. Only for that he must see just how he had figured to her. What exactly was the account I gave? Of the way you did feel? Well it was very simple. You said you had had from your earliest time as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you. If you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you, do you call that very simple? John Marcher asked. She thought a moment. It was perhaps because I seemed as you spoke to understand it. You do understand it? He eagerly asked. Again she kept her kind eyes on him. Do you still have the belief? Oh! He exclaimed helplessly there was too much to say. Whatever it's to be, she clearly made out. It hasn't yet come. He shook his head in complete surrender now. It hasn't yet come. Only you know it isn't anything I'm to do to achieve in the world to be distinguished or admired for. I'm not such an ass as that. It would be much better, no doubt, if I were. It's to be something you're merely to suffer? Well, say to wait for, to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life, possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me. Possibly on the other hand only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves. She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery. Isn't what you describe, perhaps but the expectation, or at any rate, the sense of danger familiar to so many people, of falling in love? John Marcher thought, Did you ask me that before? No, I wasn't so free and easy then. But it's what strikes me now. Of course, he said after a moment, it strikes you, of course it strikes me. Of course what's in store for me may be no more than that. The only thing is, he went on, that I think if it had been that, I should by this time know. Do you mean because you've been in love? And then, as he but looked at her in silence, you've been in love and it hasn't met such a cataclysm, hasn't proved the great affair? Here I am, you see. It hasn't been overwhelming. Then it hasn't been love, said May Bartram. Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that. I've taken it till now. It was agreeable. It was delightful. It was miserable, he explained. But it wasn't strange. It wasn't what my affair is to be. You want something all to yourself? Something that nobody else knows or has known? It isn't a question of what I want. God knows I don't want anything. It's only a question of the apprehension that haunts me that I live with day by day. He said this so lucidly and consistently that he could see it further impose itself. She hadn't been interested before. She'd have been interested now. Is it a sense of coming violence? Evidently now, too, again, he liked to talk of it. I don't think of it as, when it does come, necessarily violent. I only think of it as natural and, as, of course, above all, unmistakable. I think of it simply as the thing. The thing will of itself appear natural. Then how will it appear strange? Marcher bethought himself. It won't, to me. To whom, then? Well, he replied, smiling at last. Say to you, oh, then I'm to be present? Why you are present, since you know. I see. He turned it over. But I mean at the catastrophe. At this for a moment their lightness gave way to their gravity. It was as if the long look they exchanged held them together. It will only depend on yourself. If you'll watch with me. Are you afraid? She asked. Don't leave me now, he went on. Are you afraid? She repeated. Do you think me simply out of my mind, he pursued instead of answering? Do I merely strike you as a harmless lunatic? No, said May Bartram. I understand you, I believe you. You mean you feel how my obsession, poor old thing, may correspond to some possible reality? To some possible reality? Then you will watch with me? She hesitated, then for the third time put her question. Are you afraid? Did I tell you I was, at Naples? No, you said nothing about it. Then I don't know. And I should like to know, said John Marcher. You'll tell me yourself whether you think so. If you'll watch with me, you'll see. Very good, then. They had been moving by this time across the room, and at the door before passing out, they paused as for the full wind-up of their understanding. I'll watch with you, said May Bartram. End of chapter 1 of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James. Chapter 2 of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James. Chapter 2. The fact that she knew, knew and yet neither chaffed him nor betrayed him, had in a short time begun to constitute between them a goodly bond, which became more marked when within the year that followed their afternoon at weather end, the opportunities for meeting multiplied. The event that thus promoted these occasions was the death of the ancient lady her great aunt, under whose wing since losing her mother, she had to such an extent found shelter, and who, though but the widowed mother of the new successor to the property, had succeeded thanks to a high tone and a high temper, in not forfeiting the supreme position at the great house. The deposition of this personage arrived but with her death, which, followed by many changes, made in particular a difference for the young woman in whom Marcher's expert attention had recognized from the first a dependent with a pride that might ache, though it didn't bristle. Looking for a long time had made him easier than the thought that the aching must have been much soothed by Miss Bartram's now finding herself able to set up a small home in London. She had acquired property to an amount that made that luxury just possible under her aunt's extremely complicated will, and when the whole matter began to be straightened out which indeed took time, she let him know that the happy issue was at last in view. He had seen her again before that day, both because she had more than once accompanied the ancient lady to town, and because he had paid another visit to the friends who so conveniently made of weather end one of the charms of their own hospitality. These friends had taken him back there. He had achieved there again with Miss Bartram some quiet detachment, and he had in London succeeded in persuading her to more than one brief absence from her aunt. They went together on these latter occasions to the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked of Italy at large, not now attempting a recover, as at first, the taste of their youth and their ignorance. That recovery, the first day at weather end, had served its purpose well, had given them quite enough, so that they were, to marcher sense, no longer hovering about the headwaters of their stream, but had felt their boat pushed sharply off and down the current. They were literally afloat together. After our gentleman, this was marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was just the buried treasure of her knowledge. He had, with his own hands, dug up this little horde, brought to light, that is, to within reach of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privacies, the object of value, the hiding place of which he had, after putting it into the ground himself, so strangely so long forgotten. The rare luck of his having again just stumbled on the spot, made him indifferent to any other question. He would doubtless have devoted more time to the odd accident of his lapse of memory, if he hadn't been moved to devote so much to the sweetness, the comfort as he felt for the future, that this accident itself had helped to keep fresh. It had never entered into his plan that any one should know, and mainly for the reason that it wasn't in him to tell any one. That would have been impossible for nothing but the amusement of a cold world would have waited on it. Since, however, a mysterious fate had opened his mouth betimes in spite of him, he would count that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost. But the right person should know tempered the asperity of his secret more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine, and May Bartram was clearly right, because, well, because there she was. Her knowledge simply settled it. He would have been sure enough by this time had she been wrong. There was that in his situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as a mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact, the fact only, of her interest in his predicament, from her mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent, not to regard him as the funniest of the funny, aware in fine that her price for him was just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably spared. She was careful to remember that she also had a life of her own, with things that might happen to her, things that in friendship one should likewise take account of. Something fairly remarkable came to pass with him for that matter in this connection, something represented by a certain passage of his consciousness in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the other. He had thought himself so long as nobody knew, the most disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving others no glimpse of it, nor of its effect upon his life, asking of them no allowance, and only making on his side all those that were asked. He hadn't disturbed people with the queerness of their having to know a haunted man, though he had had moments of rather special temptation on hearing them say they were, forsooth, unsettled. If they were as unsettled as he was, he who had never been settled for an hour in his life, they would owe what it meant. It wasn't all the same for him to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough. This is why he had such good, though possibly such rather colorless, manners. This was why, above all, he could regard himself in a greedy world as decently, as in fact perhaps even a little sublimely, unselfish. Our point is accordingly that he valued this character quite sufficiently to measure his present danger of letting it lapse, against which he promised himself to be much on his guard. He was quite ready, nonetheless, to be selfish just a little, since surely no more charming occasion for it had come to him. Just a little, in a word, was just as much as Miss Bartram taking one day with another would let him. He never would be in the least coercive, and would keep well before him the lines on which consideration for her, the very highest, ought to proceed. He would thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities, he went so far as to give them the latitude of that name, would come into their intercourse. All this, naturally, was a sign of how much he took the intercourse itself for granted. There was nothing more to be done about that. It simply existed, had sprung into being with her first penetrating question to him in the autumn light there at weather end. The real form it should have taken, on the basis that stood out large, was the form of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn't a privilege he could invite a woman to share, and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him. One thing or other lay in wait for him amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little whether the crouching beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature, and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger hunt. Such was the image under which he had ended by figuring his life. They had at first, nonetheless, in the scattered hour spent together, made no illusion to that view of it. Which was a sign he was handsomely alert to give that he didn't expect, that he in fact didn't care always to be talking about it. Such a feature in one's outlook was really like a hump on one's back, the difference it made every minute of the day existed quite independently of discussion. One discussed, of course, like a hunchback, for there was always, if nothing else, the hunchback face. That remained, and she was watching him. But people watched best as a general thing in silence, so that such would be predominantly the manner of their vigil. Yet he didn't want, at the same time, to be tense and solemn. Tense and solemn was what he imagined he too much showed for with other people. The thing to be with the one person who knew was easy and natural. To make the reference rather than be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather than be seeming to make it, and to keep it, in any case, familiar, facetious even, rather than pedantic and portentous. Some such consideration as the latter was doubtless in his mind, for instance, when he wrote pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the great thing he had so long felt, as in the lap of the gods, was no more than this circumstance which touched him so nearly, of her acquiring a house in London. It was the first illusion they had yet again made, needing any other hitherto so little. But when she replied, after having given him the news, that she was by no means satisfied with such a trifle as the climax to so special a suspense, she almost set him wondering if she hadn't even a larger conception of singularity for him than he had for himself. He was at all events destined to become aware, little by little, as time went by, that she was all the while looking at his life, judging it, measuring it in the light of the thing she knew, which grew to be at last, with the consecration of the years, never mentioned between them save as the real truth about him. That had always been his own form of reference to it. But she adopted the form so quietly that, looking back at the end of a period, he knew there was no moment at which it was traceable that she had, as he might say, got inside his idea, or exchanged the attitude of beautifully indulging for that, of still more beautifully believing him. It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him, but as the most harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run, since it's covered so much ground, was his easiest description of their friendship. He had a screw loose for her, but she liked him in spite of it, and was practically, against the rest of the world, his kind, wise keeper, unremunerated, but fairly amused, and, in the absence of other near ties, not disreputably occupied. The rest of the world, of course, thought him queer. But she, she only, knew how, and above all, why queer, which was precisely what enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds. She took his gaiety from him, since it had to pass with them for gaiety, as she took everything else. But she certainly so far justified by her unerring touch his finer sense of the degree to which he had ended by convincing her. She at least never spoke of the secret of his life except as, the real truth about you. And she had in fact a wonderful way of making it seem, as such, the secret of her own life too. That was, in fine, how he so constantly felt her as allowing for him. He couldn't, on the whole, call it anything else. He allowed for himself. But she, exactly, allowed still more. Partly because, better placed for a sight of the matter, she traced his unhappy perversion through reaches of its course into which he could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt, but, besides knowing that, she knew how he looked as well. He knew each of the things of importance he was insidiously kept from doing. But she could add up the amount they made, understand how much, with a lighter weight on his spirit, he might have done. And thereby establish how, clever as he was, he fell short. Of all, she was in the secret of the difference between the forms he went through, those of his little office under government, those of caring for his modest patrimony, for his library, for his garden in the country, for the people in London whose invitations he accepted and repaid, and the detachment that reigned beneath them and that made of all behavior all that could in the least be called behavior a long act of dissimulation. What it had come to was that he wore a mask, painted with the social simper, out of the eye holes of which there looked eyes of an expression not in the least matching the other features. This the stupid world, even after years, had never more than half discovered. It was only May Bartram, who had, and she achieved, by an art indescribable, the feet of at once, or perhaps it was only alternately, meeting the eyes from in front, and mingling her own vision, as from over his shoulder, with their peep through the apertures. So while they grew older together, she did watch with him, and so she let this association give shape and color to her own existence. Beneath her forms as well, detachment had learned to sit, and behavior had become for her, in the social sense, a false account of herself. There was but one account of her that would have been true all the while, and that she could give straight to nobody, least of all to John Marcher. Her whole attitude was a virtual statement, but the perception of that only seemed called to take its place for him as one of the many things necessarily crowded out of his consciousness. If she had, moreover, like himself, to make sacrifices to their real truth, it was to be granted that her compensation might have affected her as more prompt and more natural. They had long periods in this London time, during which, when they were together, a stranger might have listened to them without in the least pricking up his ears. On the other hand, the real truth was equally liable at any moment to rise to the surface, and the auditor would then have wondered indeed what they were talking about. They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was luckily unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their common places. Yet there were still moments when the situation turned almost fresh, usually under the effect of some expression drawn from herself. Her expressions doubtless repeated themselves, but her intervals were generous. What saves us, you know, is that we answer so completely to so usual an appearance that of the man and woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit, or almost as to be at last indispensable. That, for instance, was a remark she had frequently enough had occasion to make, though she had given it at different times, different developments. What we are especially concerned with is the turn it happened to take from her one afternoon when he had come to see her in honour of her birthday. This anniversary had fallen on a Sunday, at a season of thick fog and general outward gloom, but he had brought her his customary offering, having known her now long enough to have established a hundred small traditions. It was one of his proofs to himself, the present he made her on her birthday, that he hadn't sunk into real selfishness. It was mostly nothing more than a small trinket, but it was always fine of its kind, and he was regularly careful to pay for it more than he thought he could afford. Our habit saves you, at least, don't you see? Because it makes you, after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men. What's the most inveterate mark of men in general? Why, the capacity to spend endless time with dull women, to spend it, I won't say, without being bored, but without minding that they are, without being driven off at a tangent by it, which comes to the same thing. I'm your dull woman, a part of the daily bread for which you pray at church. That covers your tracks more than anything. And what covers yours? Asked Marcher, whom his dull woman could mostly to this extent amuse. I see, of course, what you mean by your saving me in this way and that, so far as other people are concerned I've seen it all along. Only what is it that saves you? I often think you know of that. She looked as if she sometimes thought of that, too, but rather in a different way. Where other people you mean are concerned? Well, you're really so in with me, you know, as a sort of result of my being so in with yourself. I mean of my having such an immense regard for you, being so tremendously mindful of all you've done for me. I sometimes ask myself if it's quite fair. Fair I mean to have so involved and, since one may say it, interested you. I almost feel as if you hadn't really had time to do anything else. Anything else but be interested? She asked. Ah, what else does one ever want to be? If I've been watching with you, as we long ago agreed I was to do, watching's always in itself an absorption. Oh, certainly, John Marcher said. If you hadn't had your curiosity, only doesn't it sometimes come to you as time goes on that your curiosity isn't being particularly repaid? May Bartram had a pause. Do you ask that by any chance because you feel it all that yours isn't? I mean because you have to wait so long? Oh, he understood what she meant. For the thing to happen that never does happen? For the beast to jump out? No, I'm just where I was about it. It isn't a matter as to which I can choose. I can decide for a change. It isn't one as to which there can be a change. It's in the lap of the gods. Ones in the hands of one's law, there one is. As to the form the law will take, the way it will operate? That's its own affair. Yes, Miss Bartram replied. Of course, one's fate's coming, of course it has come, in its own form and its own way all the while. Only you know the form and the way in your case were to have been, well, something so exceptional, and, as one may say, so particularly your own. Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. You say were to have been, as if in your heart you had begun to doubt. Oh, she vaguely protested. As if you believed, he went on, that nothing will now take place. She shook her head slowly, but rather inscrutably. Your bar from my thought, he continued to look at her. What then is the matter with you? Well, she said after another wait. The matter with me is simply that I'm more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be but too well repaid. They were frankly grave now. He had got up from his seat, had turned once more about the little drawing-room, to which year after year he brought his inevitable topic. And which he had, as he might have said, tasted their intimate community with every sauce, where every object was as familiar to him as the things of his own house, and the very carpets were worn with his fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-houses are worn by the elbows of generations of clerks. The generations of his nervous moods had been at work there, and the place was the written history of his whole middle life. Under the impression of what his friend had just said, he knew himself, for some reason, more aware of these things, which made him, after a moment, stop again before her. Is it possibly that you've grown afraid? Afraid! He thought, as she repeated the word, that his question had made her a little change-colour. So that, lest he should have touched on a truth, he explained very kindly, You remember? That was what you asked me long ago, that first day at Weatherend. Oh yes, and you told me you didn't know, that I was to see for myself. We've said little about it since, even in so long a time. Precisely, Marcher interposed. Quite as if it were too delicate a matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might find on pressure, that I am afraid. For then, he said, we shouldn't, should we, quite know what to do. She had, for the time, no answer to this question. There have been days when I thought you were. Only of course, she added, there have been days when we have thought almost anything. Everything. Oh, Marcher softly groaned, as with a gasp half spent, at the face more uncovered just then than it had been for a long while, of the imagination always with them. It had always had its incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as with the very eyes of the very beast. And used as he was to them, they could still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that rose from the depths of his being. All they had thought, first and last, rolled over him. The past seemed to have been reduced to mere barren speculation. This in fact was what the place had just struck him as so full of. The simplification of everything but the state of suspense. That remained only by seeming to hang in the void surrounding it. Even his original fear, if fear it as had been, had lost itself in the desert. I judge, however, he continued, that you see I'm not afraid now. What I see, as I make it out, is that you've achieved something almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living with it so long and so closely, you've lost your sense of it. You know it's there, but you're indifferent, and you cease even, as of old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the danger is, May Bartram wound up, I'm bound to say, I don't think your attitude could well be surpassed. John Marcher faintly smiled. It's heroic? Certainly. Call it that. It was what he would have liked, indeed, to call it. I am, then, a man of courage? That's what you were to show me. He still, however, wondered. But doesn't the man of courage know what he's afraid of or not afraid of? I don't know that, you see. I don't focus it. I can't name it. I only know I'm exposed. Yes, but exposed? How shall I say? So directly, so intimately. That's surely enough. Enough to make you feel, then, as what we may call the end and the upshot of our watch, that I'm not afraid? You're not afraid. But it isn't, she said, the end of our watch. That is, it isn't the end of yours. You've everything still to see. Then why haven't you? He asked. He had had, all along today, the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had it. As this was his first impression of that, it made quite a date. The case was the more marked, as she didn't at first answer, which in turn made him go on. You know something I don't. Then his voice, for that of a man of courage, trembled a little. You know what's to happen. Her silence, with the face she showed, was almost a confession. It made him sure. You know, and you're afraid to tell me. It's so bad that you're afraid I'll find out. All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to her, he had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly drawn round her. Yet she might, after all, not have worried. And the real climax was that he himself at all events needn't. End of Chapter 2 of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James Chapter 3 of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James Chapter 3 of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James It was all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date, which came out in the fact that again and again, even after long intervals, other things that passed between them were in relation to this hour but the character of recalls and results. Its immediate effect had been indeed rather to lighten insistence, almost to provoke a reaction, as if their topic had dropped by its own weight and as if, moreover, for that matter, Marcher had been visited by one of his occasional warnings against egotism. He had kept up, he felt, and very decently on the whole, his consciousness of the importance of not being selfish, and it was true that he had never sinned in that direction without promptly enough trying to press the scales the other way. He often repaired his fault the season permitting by inviting his friend to accompany him to the opera, and it not infrequently thus happened that, to show he didn't wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind, he was the cause of her appearing there with him a dozen nights in the month. It even happened that, seeing her home at such times, he occasionally went in with her to finish, as he called it, the evening, and, the better to make his point, sat down to the frugal but always careful little supper that awaited his pleasure. His point was made, he thought, by his not internally insisting with her on himself. Made, for instance, at such hours, when it befell that her piano at hand and each of them familiar with it, they went over passages of the opera together. It chanced to be on one of these occasions, however, that he reminded her of her not having answered a certain question he had put to her during the talk that had taken place between them on her last birthday. What is it that saves you? Saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation from the usual human type. If he had practically escaped remark, as she pretended, by doing in the most important particular what most men do, find the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a sort with a woman no better than himself, how had she escaped it? And how could the alliance, such as it was, since they must suppose it had been more or less noticed, have failed to make her rather positively talked about? I never said, may Bartram replied, that it hadn't made me a good deal talked about. Ah, well then, you're not saved. It hasn't been a question for me. If you've had your woman, I've had, she said, my man. And you mean that makes you all right? Oh, it was always as if there was so much to say. I don't know why it shouldn't make me, humanly, which is what we're speaking of, as right as it makes you. I see, Marcher returned, humanly, no doubt, as showing that you're living for something, not that is just for me and my secret. May Bartram smiled. I don't pretend it exactly shows that I'm not living for you. It's my intimacy with you that's in question. He laughed as he saw what she meant. Yes, but since as you say I'm only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're, aren't you? No more than ordinary either. You helped me to pass for a man like another. So if I am, as I understand you, you're not compromised, is that it? She had another of her weights. But she spoke clearly enough. That's it. It's all that concerns me, to help you to pass for a man like another. He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely. How kind, how beautiful you are to me! How shall I ever repay you? She had her last grave pause as if there might be a choice of ways. But she chose. By going on as you are, it was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and really for so long a time that the day inevitably came for a further sounding of their depths. These depths constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough in spite of its lightness, and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion in the interest of their nerves a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had all the while not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she didn't dare to express. A charge uttered just before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. It had come up for him, then, that she knew something, and that what she knew was bad, too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left the matter too equivocal to be let alone, and yet for Marcher's special sensibility almost too formidable again to touch. He circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and widened, and that still wasn't much affected by the consciousness in him that there was nothing she could know, after all, any better than he did. She had no source of knowledge he hadn't equally, except, of course, that she might have finer nerves. That was what women had, where they were interested. They made out things, where people were concerned, that the people often couldn't have made out for themselves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram was in particular that she had given herself so to his case. He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he had never felt before the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe. Some catastrophe that yet wouldn't at all be THE catastrophe. Partly because she had almost of a sudden begun to strike him as more useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an appearance of uncertainty in her health, coincident and equally new. It was characteristic of the inner detachment he had hitherto so successfully cultivated, and to which our whole account of him is a reference. It was characteristic that his complications, such as they were, had never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken about him, even to the point of making him ask himself if he were, by any chance, of a truth within sight or sound within touch or reach, within the immediate jurisdiction of the thing that waited. When the day came, as Comet had to, that his friend confessed to him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood. He felt somehow the shadow of a change and the chill of a shock. He immediately began to imagine aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of her peril as the direct menace for himself of personal probation. This indeed gave him one of those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable to him. It showed him that what was still first in his mind was the loss she herself might suffer. What if she should have to die before knowing, before seeing? It would have been brutal, in the early stages of her trouble, to put that question to her. But it had immediately sounded for him to his own concern, and the possibility was what most made him sorry for her. If she did know, moreover, in the sense of her having had some, what should he think, mystical, irresistible light, this would make the matter not better, but worse, in as much as her original adoption of his own curiosity had quite become the basis of her life. She had been living to see what would be to be seen, and it would quite lacerate her to have to give up before the accomplishment of the vision. These reflections, as I say, quickened his generosity. Yet make them as he might, he saw himself with the lapse of the period, more and more disconcerted. It lapsed for him with a strange, steady sweep, and the oddest oddity was that it gave him, independently of the threat of much inconvenience, almost the only positive surprise his career, of career it could be called, had yet offered him. She kept the house as she had never done. He had to go to her to see her. She could meet him nowhere now, though there was scarce a corner of their loved old London in which she hadn't in the past at one time or another done so. And he found her always seated by her fire. In the deep old-fashioned chair she was less and less able to leave. She had been struck one day, after an absence exceeding his usual measure, with her suddenly looking much older to him than he had ever thought of her being. Then he recognized that the suddenness was all on his side he had just simply and suddenly noticed. She looked older because inevitably, after so many years, she was old, or almost, which was of course true in still greater measure of her companion. If she was old, or almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth home to him. His surprises began here. When once they had begun they multiplied. They came rather with a rush. It was as if, in the oddest way of the world, they had all been kept back, sewn in a thick cluster for the late afternoon of life, the time at which for people in general the unexpected has died out. One of them was that he should have caught himself, for he had so done, really wondering if the great accident would take form now as nothing more than his being condemned to see this charming woman, this admirable friend, pass away from him. He had never so unreservedly qualified her, as while confronted in thought with such a possibility, in spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long griddle, the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures. He had been far from holding it a failure, long as he had waited for the appearance that was to make it a success. He had waited for quite another thing, not for such a thing as that. The breadth of his good faith came short, however, as he recognized how long he had waited, or how long at least his companion had, that she, at all events, might be recorded as having waited in vain. This affected him sharply, and all the more because of his first having done little more than amuse himself with the idea. It grew more grave as the gravity of her condition grew, and the state of mind it produced in him, which he himself ended by watching as if it had been some definite disfigurement of his outer person may pass for another of his surprises. This conjoined itself still with another, the really stupefying consciousness of a question that he would have allowed to shape itself had he dared. What did everything mean? What that is, did she mean? She and her vain waiting, and her probable death, and the soundless admonition of it all? Unless that, at this time of day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too late. He had never, at any stage of his queer consciousness, admitted the whisper of such a correction. He had never, till within these last few months, been so false to his conviction, as not to hold that what was to come to him had time whether he struck himself as having it or not, that at last, at last he certainly hadn't it to speak of, or had it, but in the scantiest measure. Such soon enough, as things went with him, became the inference with which his old obsession had to reckon. And this it was not helped to do by the more and more confirmed appearance that the great vagueness, casting the long shadow in which he had lived, had, to attest itself, almost no margin left. Since it was in time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in time that his fate was to have acted. And as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matter beside. It all hung together. They were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonored, pilloried, hanged. It was failure not to be anything. And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as he groped. He didn't care what awful crash might overtake him, with what ignominy or what monstrosity he might yet be associated, since he wasn't, after all, too utterly old to suffer. If it would only be decently proportionate to the posture he had kept all his life in the threatened presence of it, he had but one desire left, that he shouldn't have been sold. It was that one afternoon, while the spring of the year was young and new, she met all in her own way his frankest betrayal of these alarms. He had gone in late to see her, but evening hadn't settled, and she was presented to him in that long, fresh light of waning April days, which affects us often with a sadness sharper than the grayest hours of autumn. The week had been warm, the spring was supposed to have begun early, and May Bartram sat for the first time in the year without a fire, a fact that, to marcher's sense, gave the scene of which she formed part a smooth and ultimate look, an air of knowing, in its immaculate order and cold, meaningless cheer, that it would never see a fire again. Her own aspect, he could scarce have said why, intensified this note, almost as white as wax, with the marks and signs in her face as numerous, and as fine as if they had been etched by a needle, with soft white draperies relieved by a faded green scarf, on the delicate tone of which the years had further refined. She was the picture of a serene and exquisite but impenetrable sphinx, whose head, or indeed all whose person, might have been powdered with silver. She was a sphinx. Yet with her white petals and green fronds she might have been a lily too. Only an artificial lily, wonderfully imitated and constantly kept, without dust or stain, though not exempt from a slight droop, and a complexity of faint creases, under some clear glass bell. The perfection of household care, of high polish and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they now looked most as if everything had been wound up, tucked in, put away, so that she might sit with folded hands and with nothing more to do. She was out of it, to marcher's vision. Her work was over. She communicated with him as across some gulf, or from some island of rest, that she had already reached, and it made him feel strangely abandoned. Was it, or rather wasn't it, that if for so long she had been watching with him the answer to their question must have swum into her can and taken on its name, so that her occupation was verily gone? He had as much as charged her with this, in saying to her, many months before, that she even then knew something she was keeping from him. It was a point he had never since ventured to press, vaguely fearing as he did that it might become a difference, perhaps a disagreement between them. He had in this later time turned nervous, which was what he in all the other years had never been, and the oddity was that his nervousness should have waited till he had begun to doubt, should have held off so long as he was sure. There was something, it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something that would so at least ease off his tension. But he wanted not to speak the wrong word, that would make everything ugly. He wanted the knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if drop it could, by its own August weight. If she was to forsake him it was surely for her to take leave. This was why he didn't directly ask her again what she knew, but it was also why, approaching the matter from another side, he said to her in the course of his visit, What do you regard as the very worst that at this time of day can happen to me? He had asked her that in the past often enough, they had with the odd irregular rhythm of their intensities and avoidances, exchanged ideas about it, and then had seen the ideas washed away by cool intervals, washed like figures traced in sea-sand. It had ever been the mark of their talk that the oldest illusions in it required but a little dismissal and reaction to come out again, sounding for the hour as a new. She could thus at present meet his enquiry quite freshly and patiently. Oh, yes, I've repeatedly thought, only it always seemed to me of old that I couldn't quite make up my mind. I thought of dreadful things, between which it was difficult to choose, and so must you have done. Rather, I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else. I appear to myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing but dreadful things. A great many of them I've at different times named to you. But there were others I couldn't name. They were too too dreadful? Too too dreadful, some of them. She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he met it an inconsequence sense that her eyes, when one got their full clearness, were still as beautiful as they had been in youth. Only beautiful with a strange cold light, a light that somehow was a part of the effect, if it wasn't rather a part of the cause, of the pale hard sweetness of the season and the hour. And yet, she said at last, there are horrors we've mentioned. It deepened the strangeness to see her as such a figure in such a picture, talk of horrors. But she was to do in a few minutes something stranger yet, though even of this he was to take the full measure but afterwards. And the note of it already trembled. It was, for the matter of that, one of the signs that her eyes were having again the high flicker of their prime. He had to admit, however, what she said. Oh, yes, there were times when we did go far. He caught himself in the act of speaking as if it were all over. Well, he wished it were. And the consummation depended for him clearly more and more on his friend. But she had now a soft smile. Oh, far! It was oddly ironic. Do you mean we're prepared to go further? She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to look at him, yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread. Do you consider that we went far? Why, I thought at the point you were just making, that we had looked most things in the face. Including each other? She still smiled, but you're quite right. We've had together great imaginations, often great fears. But some of them have been unspoken. Then the worst, we haven't faced that. I could face it, I believe, if I knew what you think it. I feel, he explained, as if I had lost my power to conceive such things. And he wondered if he looked as blank as he sounded. It's spent. Then why do you assume, she said, that mine isn't? Because you've given me signs to the contrary. It isn't a question for you of conceiving, imagining, comparing. It isn't a question now of choosing. At last he came out with it. You know something I don't. You've shown me that before. These last words had affected her he made out in a moment exceedingly. And she spoke with firmness. I've shown you, my dear, nothing. He shook his head. You can't hide it. Oh, oh! May Bartram sounded over what she couldn't hide. It was almost a smothered groan. You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you, as of something you were afraid I should find out. Your answer was that I couldn't, that I wouldn't, and I don't pretend I have. But you had something there for in mind, and I see now how it must have been, how it still is, the possibility that, of all possibilities, has settled itself for you as the worst. This, he went on, is why I appeal to you. I'm only afraid of ignorance today. I'm not afraid of knowledge. And then, as for a while, she said nothing. What makes me sure is that I see in your face, and feel here, in this air, and amid these appearances, that you're out of it. You've done. You've had your experience. You leave me to my fate. Well, she listened, motionless and white in her chair, as on a decision to be made, so that her manner was fairly and avowal, though still with a small fine inner stiffness, an imperfect surrender. It would be the worst, she finally let herself say. I mean the thing I've never said. It hushed him a moment. More monstrous than all the monstrosities we've named? More monstrous. Isn't that what you sufficiently express, she asked, in calling it the worst? Marcher thought. Assuredly, if you mean as I do something that includes all the loss and all the shame that are thinkable, it would, if it should happen, said May Bartram. What we're speaking of, remember, is only my idea. Mr. Belief, Marcher returned. That's enough for me. I feel your beliefs are right. Therefore if, having this one, you give me no more light on it, you abandon me. No, no, she repeated. I'm with you, don't you see, still? And as to make it more vivid to him, she rose from her chair, a movement she seldom risked in these days, and showed herself all draped and all soft in her fairness and slimness. I haven't forsaken you. It was really, in its effort against weakness, a generous assurance, and had the success of the impulse not happily been great, it would have touched him to pain more than to pleasure. But the cold charm in her eyes had spread. As she hovered before him, to all the rest of her person, so that it was, for the minute, almost a recovery of youth. He couldn't pity her for that. He could only take her as she showed, as capable even yet of helping him. It was as if, at the same time, her light might at any instant go out, wherefore he must make the most of it. There passed before him with intensity the three or four things he wanted most to know. But the question that came of itself to his lips really covered the others. Then tell me if I shall consciously suffer. She promptly shook her head. Never. It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced on him an extraordinary effect. Well, what's better than that? Do you call that the worst? You think nothing is better, she asked. He seemed to mean something so special, that he again sharply wondered, though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief. Why not, if one doesn't know? After which, as their eyes over his question met in a silence, the dawn deepened, and something to his purpose came prodigiously out of her very face. His own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead, and he gasped, with the force of a perception to which, on the instant, everything fitted. The sound of his gasp filled the air. Then he became articulate. I see, if I don't suffer. In her own look, however, was doubt. You see what? Why what you mean, what you've always meant? She again shook her head. What I mean isn't what I've always meant. It's different. It's something new? She hung back from it a little. Something new? It's not what you think. I see what you think. His divination drew breath then. Only her correction might be wrong. It isn't that I am a blockhead? He asked between faintness and grimness. It isn't that it's all a mistake? A mistake, she pityingly echoed. That possibility, for her, he saw, would be monstrous, and if she guaranteed him the immunity from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in mind. Oh, no, she declared. It's nothing of that sort. You've been right. Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus pressed, seeking but to save him. It seemed to him he should be most in a hole if his history should prove all a platitude. Are you telling me the truth so that I shan't have been a bigger idiot than I can bear to know? I haven't lived with a vain imagination in the most besotted illusion. I haven't waited but to see the door shut in my face. She shook her head again. However the case stands, that isn't the truth. After the reality it is a reality. The door isn't shut, the door's open, said May Bartram. Then something's to come. She waited, once again, always with her cold, sweet eyes on him. It's never too late. She had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken. Her movement might have been for some finer emphasis of what she was at once hesitating and deciding to say. He had been standing by the chimney-piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a small perfect old French clock and two morsels of rosy Dresden constituting all its furniture. And her hand grasped the shelf, while she kept him waiting, grasped it a little as for support and encouragement. She only kept him waiting, however. That is, he only waited. It had become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him, that she had something more to give him. Her wasted face, delicately shown with it, it clittered almost as with the white luster of silver in her expression. She was right, incontestably, for what he saw in her face was the truth. And strangely, without consequence, while their talk of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to present it as inordinately soft. This, prompting for Wildermann, made him but gait the more gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant. The end, nonetheless, was that what he had expected failed to come to him. Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes. She gave way at the same instant to a slow, fine shudder, and though he remained staring, though he stared in fact but the harder, turned off and regained her chair. It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that. Well, you don't say? She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney, and had sunk back, strangely pale. I'm afraid I'm too ill. Too ill to tell me? It sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips the fear she might die without giving him light. He checked himself in time from so expressing his question, but she answered as if she had heard the words. Don't you know now, now? She had spoken as if some difference had been made within the moment. But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was already with them. I know nothing! And he was afterwards to say to himself that he must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience as to show that supremely disconcerted he washed his hands of the whole question. Oh! said May Bartram. Are you in pain? He asked as the woman went to her. No, said May Bartram. Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her. In spite of which, however, he showed once more his mystification. What then has happened? She was once more with her companion's help on her feet, and feeling withdrawal imposed on him. He had blankly found his hat and gloves, and had reached the door. Yet he waited for her answer. What was to, she said, end of Chapter 4 of The Beast in the Jungle, by Henry James. Chapter 5 of The Beast in the Jungle, by Henry James. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 5 of The Beast in the Jungle. He came back the next day, but she was then unable to see him. And as it was literally the first time this had occurred in the long stretch of their acquaintance, he turned away, defeated, and soar, almost angry, or feeling at least that such a break in their custom was really the beginning of the end, and wandered alone with his thoughts, especially with the one he was least able to keep down. She was dying, and he would lose her. She was dying, and his life would end. He stopped in the park, and he had passed, and stared before him at his recurrent doubt. Away from her the doubt pressed again. In her presence he had believed her. But as he to the explanation nearest at hand had most of a miserable warmth for him, and least of a cold torment. She had deceived him to save him, to put him off with something in which he should be able to rest. What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had began to happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude. That was what he had figured as the beast in the jungle. That was what had been in the lap of the gods. He had had her word for it, as he left her. What else on earth could she have meant? It wasn't a thing of a monstrous order, not a fate rare and distinguished, not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and immortalized. It had only the stamp of the common doom. But poor marcher at this hour judged the common doom sufficient. It would serve his turn, and even as the consummation of infinite waiting he would bend his pride to accept it. He sat down on a bench in the twilight. He hadn't been a fool. Something had been, as she had said, to come. Before he rose, indeed it had quite struck him that the final fact really matched with the long avenue through which he had had to reach it. As sharing his suspense, and as giving herself all, giving her life, to bring it to an end, she had come with him every step of the way. He had lived by her aid, and to leave her behind would be cruelly, damnably to miss her. What could be more overwhelming than that? Well, he was to know within the week. For though she kept him a while at bay, left him restless and wretched during a series of days on each of which he asked about her, only again to have to turn away. She ended his trial by receiving him, where she had always received him. Yet she had been brought out at some hazard into the presence of so many of the things that were consciously, vainly, half their past, and there was scant service left in the gentleness of her mere desire, all too trouble, to check his obsession and wind up his long trouble. That was clearly what she wanted, the one thing more for her own peace, while she could still put out her hand. He was so affected by her state that, once seated by her chair, he was moved to let everything go. It was she herself, therefore, who brought him back, took up again before she dismissed him, her last word of the other time. She showed how she wished to leave their business in order. I'm not sure you understood. You've nothing to wait for more. It has come. Oh, how he looked at her. Really? Really? The thing that, as you said, was to? The thing that we began in our youth to watch for. Face to face with her once more, he believed her. It was a claim to which he had so abjectly little to oppose. You mean that it has come as a positive, definite occurrence, with a name and a date? Positive. Definite. I don't know about the name, but oh, with a date. He found himself again too helplessly at sea. But come in the night, come and past me by. May Bartram had her strange, faint smile. Oh, no, it hasn't past you by. But if I haven't been aware of it, and it hasn't touched me. Ah, you're not being aware of it. And she seemed to hesitate an instant to deal with this. You're not being aware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness. It's the wonder of the wonder. She spoke as with the softness almost of a sick child, yet now at last, at the end of all, with the perfect straightness of a symbol. She visibly knew that she knew. And the effect on him was of something co-ordinate in its high character, with the law that had ruled him. It was the true voice of the law. So on her lips would the law itself have sounded. It has touched you, she went on. It has done its office. It has made you all its own. So utterly without my knowing it? So utterly without your knowing it. His hand, as he leaned to her, was on the arm of her chair. And dimly smiling always now, she placed her own on it. It's enough if I know it. Oh, he confusedly breathed, as she herself of late so often had done. What I long ago said is true, you'll never know how, and I think you ought to be content. You've had it, said May Bartram. But had what? Why what was to have marked you out, the proof of your law? It has acted. I'm too glad, she then bravely added, to have been able to see what it's not. He continued to attach his eyes to her, and with the sense that it was all beyond him, and that she was too. He would still have sharply challenged her, hadn't he so felt it an abuse of her weakness to do more than take devoutly what she gave him, take it hushed as to a revelation. If he did speak, it was out of the foreknowledge of his loneliness to come. If you're glad of what it's not, it might then have been worse. She turned her eyes away. She looked straight before her, with which after a moment. Well, you know our fears. He wondered. It's something then we never feared. On this slowly she turned to him. Did we ever dream, with all our dreams, that we should sit and talk of it thus? He tried for a little to make out that they had. But it was as if their dreams, numberless enough, were in solution in some thick cold mist through which thought lost itself. It might have been that we couldn't talk. Well, she did her best for him, not from this side. This, you see, she said, is the other side. I think, poor Marcher returned, that all sides are the same to me. Then, however, as she gently shook her head in correction, we mightn't, as it were, have got across to where we are, know we're here. She made her weak emphasis. And much good does it do us, was her friend's frank comment. It does us the good it can. It does us the good that it isn't here. It's past, it's behind, said May Bartram, before—but her voice dropped. He had got up, not to tire her. But it was hard to combat his yearning. She, after all, told him nothing but that his light had failed, which he knew well enough without her. Before—he blankly echoed. Before you see, it was always to come. That kept it present. Oh, I don't care what comes now. Besides, Marcher added, it seems to me I liked it better present, as you say, than I can like it absent, with your absence. Oh, mine—and her pale hands made light of it—with the absence of everything. He had a dreadful sense of standing there before her for, so far as anything but this proved, this bottomless drop was concerned, the last time of their life. It rested on him with a weight he felt he could scarce bear, and this weight it apparently was that still pressed out what remained in him of speakable protest. I believe you, but I can't begin to pretend I understand. Nothing for me is past. Nothing will pass till I pass myself, which I pray my stars may be as soon as possible. Say, however, he added, that I've eaten my cake, as you contend, to the last crumb. How can the thing I've never felt at all? Be the thing I was marked out to feel. She met him perhaps less directly, but she met him unperturbed. You take your feelings for granted. You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it. How in the world, when what is such knowledge but suffering? She looked up at him awhile in silence. No, you don't understand. I suffer, said John Marcher. Don't, don't! How can I help at least that? Don't! May Bartram repeated. She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, that he stared an instant. Stared as if some light hitherto hidden had shimmered across his vision. Darkness again closed over it, but the gleam had already become for him an idea. Because I haven't the right. Don't know when you needn't, she mercifully urged. You needn't, for we shouldn't. Shouldn't! If he could but know what she meant. No, it's too much. Too much, he still asked, but with a mystification that was the next moment of a sudden to give way. Her words, if they meant something, affected him in this light, the light also of her wasted face, as meaning all and the sense of what knowledge had been for herself came over him with a rush which broke through into a question. Is it of that then you're dying? She but watched him gravely at first as to see with this where he was. And she might have seen something, or feared something, that moved her sympathy. I would live for you still, if I could. Her eyes closed for a little, as if withdrawn into herself she were for a last time trying. But I can't. She said, as she raised them again to take leave of him, she couldn't indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared. And he had no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom. They had parted forever in that strange talk. Access to her chamber of pain, rigidly guarded, was almost wholly forbidden him. He was feeling now moreover, in the face of doctors, nurses, the two or three relatives attracted doubtless by the presumption of what she had to leave, how few were the rights, as they were called in such cases, that he had to put forward. And how odd it might even seem that their intimacy shouldn't have given him more of them. The stupidest fourth cousin had more, even though she had been nothing in such a person's life. She had been a feature of features in his, for what else was it to have been so indispensable? Strange beyond saying were the ways of existence, baffling for him the anomaly of his lack, as he felt it to be, of producible claim. A woman might have been, as it were, everything to him, and yet it might present him in no connection that anyone seemed held to recognize. If this was the case in these closing weeks, it was the case more sharply on the occasion of the last offices rendered, in the great grey London cemetery, to what had been mortal, to what had been precious in his friend. The concourse at her grave was not numerous, but he saw himself treated as scarce more nearly concerned with it than if there had been a thousand others. He was in short, from this moment, face to face with the fact that he was to profit extraordinarily little by the interest May Bartram had taken in him. He couldn't quite have said what he expected, but he hadn't surely expected this approach to a double probation. Not only had her interest failed him, but he seemed to feel himself unattended, and for a reason he couldn't seize, by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if nothing else, of the man markedly bereaved. It was as if in the view of society he had not been markedly bereaved, as if there still failed some sign or proof of it, and as if, none the less, his character could never be affirmed nor the deficiency ever made up. There were moments as the weeks went by when he would have liked, by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the intimacy of his loss, in order that it might be questioned, and his retort to the relief of his spirit so recorded. But the moments of an irritation more helpless followed fast on these, the moments during which turning things over with a good conscience, but with a bare horizon. He found himself wondering if he oughtn't to have begun, so to speak, further back. He found himself wondering indeed at many things, and this last speculation had others to keep at company. What could he have done, after all, in her lifetime, without giving them both as it were away? He couldn't have made known she was watching him, for that would have published the superstition of the beast. This was what closed his mouth now, now that the jungle had been thrashed to vacancy and that the beast had stolen away. It sounded too foolish and too flat. The difference for him in this particular, the extinction in his life, of the element of suspense, was such as in fact to surprise him. He could scarce have said what the effect resembled, the abrupt cessation, the positive prohibition of music perhaps, more than anything else, in some place all adjusted and all accustomed to sonority and to attention. If he could at any rate have conceived lifting the veil from his image at some moment of the past, what had he done, after all, if not lifted to her? So to do this today, to talk to people at large of the jungle cleared and confide to them that he now felt it as safe, would have been not only to see them listen as to a good wife's tale, but really to hear himself tell one. What it presently came to, in truth, was that poor marcher waded through his beaten grass where no life stirred, where no breath sounded, where no evil eye seemed to gleam from a possible lair, very much as if vaguely looking for the beast, and still more as if acutely missing it, he walked about in an existence that had grown strangely more spacious, and stopping fitfully in places where the undergrowth of life struck him as closer, asked himself yearningly, wondered secretly and sorely if it would have lurked here or there. It would have, at all events, sprung. What was at least complete was his belief in the truth itself of the assurance given him. The change from his old sense to his new was absolute and final. What was to happen had so absolutely and finally happened that he was as little able to know a fear for his future as to know a hope. So absent, in short, was any question of anything still to come. He was to live entirely with the other question, that of his unidentified past, that of his having to see his fortune impenetrable muffled and masked. The torment of this vision became, then, his occupation. He couldn't perhaps have consented to live but for the possibility of guessing. She had told him, his friend, not to guess. She had forbidden him so far as he might to know. And she had even, in a sort, denied the power in him to learn. Which were so many things precisely to deprive him of rest. It wasn't that he wanted, he argued for fairness, that anything past and done should repeat itself. It was only that he shouldn't, as an anti-climax, have been taken sleeping so sound as not to be able to win back, by an effort of thought, the lost stuff of consciousness. He declared to himself at moments that he would either win it back or have done with consciousness forever. He made this idea his one motive in fine. Made it so much his passion that none other, to compare with it, seemed ever to have touched him. The lost stuff of consciousness became thus for him as a strayed or stolen child to an unappeasable father. He hunted it up and down very much as if he were knocking at doors and inquiring of the police. This was the spirit in which, inevitably, he set himself to travel. He started on a journey that was to be as long as he could make it. It danced before him that, as the other side of the globe couldn't possibly have less to say to him, it might, by a possibility of suggestion, have more. Before he quitted London, however, he made a pilgrimage to May Bartram's grave, took his way to it through the endless avenues of the grim suburban necropolis, sought it out in the wilderness of tombs. And though he had come but for the renewal of the act of farewell, found himself, when he had at last stood by it, beguiled into long intensities. He stood for an hour, powerless to turn away and yet powerless to penetrate the darkness of death, fixing with his eyes her inscribed name and date, beating his forehead.