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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Beast in the Jungle, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Beast in the Jungle
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: February 6, 2005  [eBook #1093]
+[This file last updated November 30, 2010]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1915 Martin Secker edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+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
+Weatherend 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 Weatherend 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 the 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; satisfied
+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 favourite 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 at 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
+there being scarce a spot at Weatherend 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 close from under a low
+sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots,
+old tapestry, old gold, old colour.  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
+lamplighter 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, that 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 Pembles _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 as to which she had her evidence in hand.  The
+Boyers she had known, but didn't know the Pembles, 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, as 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
+meagre.  There weren't, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little
+old things that had succeeded in coming to pass between them;
+trivialities 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 been 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 new ones enough--was
+surrounded with them for instance on 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--from 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 allusion 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'm 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.  Somehow 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 whomsoever.  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 you do
+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
+lapse 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, without 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, that 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.  "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 meant 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's 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.  If 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 unmistakeable.  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."  She turned it over.  "But I mean at the catastrophe."
+
+At this, for a minute, 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+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 Weatherend, 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 recognised
+from the first a dependent with a pride that might ache though it didn't
+bristle.  Nothing 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 Weatherend 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 to recover, as at first, the taste of their youth and
+their ignorance.  That recovery, the first day at Weatherend, had served
+its purpose well, had given them quite enough; so that they were, to
+Marcher's sense, no longer hovering about the head-waters of their
+stream, but had felt their boat pushed sharply off and down the current.
+
+They were literally afloat together; for 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
+hoard, 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.  That 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, he was careful to remember
+that she had also 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 connexion--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 know what it meant.  Yet it wasn't, all the same, for
+him to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough.  This was why
+he had such good--though possibly such rather colourless--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, none the less, 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 Weatherend.  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.  Something 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, none the less, in the scattered hours spent together,
+made no allusion 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 allusion 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 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.
+Above 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
+behaviour, all that could in the least be called behaviour, 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
+feat 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 colour to her own existence.  Beneath
+_her_ forms as well detachment had learned to sit, and behaviour 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
+commonplaces.  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 at 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.  One's 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.  "You're far 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; in 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 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 it's 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, to-day, the
+sense of her keeping something back, and he still had it.  As this was
+his first impression of that it quite made 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.  "You'll never find out."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+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
+eternally 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 were 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 help 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 waits, 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, co-incident 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 come it 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 privation.  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, inasmuch 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
+reflexions, 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, if 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.  He 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 recognised 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
+in the world, they had all been kept back, sown 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 riddle 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 breath of his good
+faith came short, however, as he recognised 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 at 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, dishonoured, 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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Then 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 greyest 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 ken 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 allusions in it required but a little
+dismissal and reaction to come out again, sounding for the hour as 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
+inconsequent 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 all were 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 you'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 it 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 asked, "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 therefore
+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 to-day--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 an 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."
+
+"It's your 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.
+
+She 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,
+speaking 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.  Whatever 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
+shone with it--it glittered almost as with the white lustre 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 bewilderment, made him but gape 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, none the
+less, 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+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 sore, 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,
+into which 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 felt his forlornness he threw himself into the explanation
+that, 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 immortalised; 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 visible,
+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 passed me by?"
+
+May Bartram had her strange faint smile.  "Oh no, it hasn't passed you
+by!"
+
+"But if I haven't been aware of it and it hasn't touched me--?"
+
+"Ah your not being aware of it"--and she seemed to hesitate an instant to
+deal with this--"your 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 sibyl.  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 now, 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--no.  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 a while 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 for ever 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 it might yet present him, in no connexion that any one seemed
+held to recognise.  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 privation.  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 it 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 lift it to _her_?) so to do
+this to-day, 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 goodwife'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 impenetrably
+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
+anticlimax, 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 for ever; 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
+enquiring 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 against the fact of the
+secret they kept, drawing his breath, while he waited, as if some sense
+would in pity of him rise from the stones.  He kneeled on the stones,
+however, in vain; they kept what they concealed; and if the face of the
+tomb did become a face for him it was because her two names became a pair
+of eyes that didn't know him.  He gave them a last long look, but no
+palest light broke.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+He stayed away, after this, for a year; he visited the depths of Asia,
+spending himself on scenes of romantic interest, of superlative sanctity;
+but what was present to him everywhere was that for a man who had known
+what _he_ had known the world was vulgar and vain.  The state of mind in
+which he had lived for so many years shone out to him, in reflexion, as a
+light that coloured and refined, a light beside which the glow of the
+East was garish cheap and thin.  The terrible truth was that he had
+lost--with everything else--a distinction as well; the things he saw
+couldn't help being common when he had become common to look at them.  He
+was simply now one of them himself--he was in the dust, without a peg for
+the sense of difference; and there were hours when, before the temples of
+gods and the sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned for nobleness of
+association to the barely discriminated slab in the London suburb.  That
+had become for him, and more intensely with time and distance, his one
+witness of a past glory.  It was all that was left to him for proof or
+pride, yet the past glories of Pharaohs were nothing to him as he thought
+of it.  Small wonder then that he came back to it on the morrow of his
+return.  He was drawn there this time as irresistibly as the other, yet
+with a confidence, almost, that was doubtless the effect of the many
+months that had elapsed.  He had lived, in spite of himself, into his
+change of feeling, and in wandering over the earth had wandered, as might
+be said, from the circumference to the centre of his desert.  He had
+settled to his safety and accepted perforce his extinction; figuring to
+himself, with some colour, in the likeness of certain little old men he
+remembered to have seen, of whom, all meagre and wizened as they might
+look, it was related that they had in their time fought twenty duels or
+been loved by ten princesses.  They indeed had been wondrous for others
+while he was but wondrous for himself; which, however, was exactly the
+cause of his haste to renew the wonder by getting back, as he might put
+it, into his own presence.  That had quickened his steps and checked his
+delay.  If his visit was prompt it was because he had been separated so
+long from the part of himself that alone he now valued.
+
+It's accordingly not false to say that he reached his goal with a certain
+elation and stood there again with a certain assurance.  The creature
+beneath the sod knew of his rare experience, so that, strangely now, the
+place had lost for him its mere blankness of expression.  It met him in
+mildness--not, as before, in mockery; it wore for him the air of
+conscious greeting that we find, after absence, in things that have
+closely belonged to us and which seem to confess of themselves to the
+connexion.  The plot of ground, the graven tablet, the tended flowers
+affected him so as belonging to him that he resembled for the hour a
+contented landlord reviewing a piece of property.  Whatever had
+happened--well, had happened.  He had not come back this time with the
+vanity of that question, his former worrying "What, _what_?" now
+practically so spent.  Yet he would none the less never again so cut
+himself off from the spot; he would come back to it every month, for if
+he did nothing else by its aid he at least held up his head.  It thus
+grew for him, in the oddest way, a positive resource; he carried out his
+idea of periodical returns, which took their place at last among the most
+inveterate of his habits.  What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was
+that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death gave him the
+few square feet of earth on which he could still most live.  It was as
+if, being nothing anywhere else for any one, nothing even for himself, he
+were just everything here, and if not for a crowd of witnesses or indeed
+for any witness but John Marcher, then by clear right of the register
+that he could scan like an open page.  The open page was the tomb of his
+friend, and there were the facts of the past, there the truth of his
+life, there the backward reaches in which he could lose himself.  He did
+this from time to time with such effect that he seemed to wander through
+the old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who was, in the
+most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self; and to wander,
+which was more extraordinary yet, round and round a third presence--not
+wandering she, but stationary, still, whose eyes, turning with his
+revolution, never ceased to follow him, and whose seat was his point, so
+to speak, of orientation.  Thus in short he settled to live--feeding all
+on the sense that he once _had_ lived, and dependent on it not alone for
+a support but for an identity.
+
+It sufficed him in its way for months and the year elapsed; it would
+doubtless even have carried him further but for an accident,
+superficially slight, which moved him, quite in another direction, with a
+force beyond any of his impressions of Egypt or of India.  It was a thing
+of the merest chance--the turn, as he afterwards felt, of a hair, though
+he was indeed to live to believe that if light hadn't come to him in this
+particular fashion it would still have come in another.  He was to live
+to believe this, I say, though he was not to live, I may not less
+definitely mention, to do much else.  We allow him at any rate the
+benefit of the conviction, struggling up for him at the end, that,
+whatever might have happened or not happened, he would have come round of
+himself to the light.  The incident of an autumn day had put the match to
+the train laid from of old by his misery.  With the light before him he
+knew that even of late his ache had only been smothered.  It was
+strangely drugged, but it throbbed; at the touch it began to bleed.  And
+the touch, in the event, was the face of a fellow-mortal.  This face, one
+grey afternoon when the leaves were thick in the alleys, looked into
+Marcher's own, at the cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a
+blade.  He felt it, that is, so deep down that he winced at the steady
+thrust.  The person who so mutely assaulted him was a figure he had
+noticed, on reaching his own goal, absorbed by a grave a short distance
+away, a grave apparently fresh, so that the emotion of the visitor would
+probably match it for frankness.  This fact alone forbade further
+attention, though during the time he stayed he remained vaguely conscious
+of his neighbour, a middle-aged man apparently, in mourning, whose bowed
+back, among the clustered monuments and mortuary yews, was constantly
+presented.  Marcher's theory that these were elements in contact with
+which he himself revived, had suffered, on this occasion, it may be
+granted, a marked, an excessive check.  The autumn day was dire for him
+as none had recently been, and he rested with a heaviness he had not yet
+known on the low stone table that bore May Bartram's name.  He rested
+without power to move, as if some spring in him, some spell vouchsafed,
+had suddenly been broken for ever.  If he could have done that moment as
+he wanted he would simply have stretched himself on the slab that was
+ready to take him, treating it as a place prepared to receive his last
+sleep.  What in all the wide world had he now to keep awake for?  He
+stared before him with the question, and it was then that, as one of the
+cemetery walks passed near him, he caught the shock of the face.
+
+His neighbour at the other grave had withdrawn, as he himself, with force
+enough in him, would have done by now, and was advancing along the path
+on his way to one of the gates.  This brought him close, and his pace,
+was slow, so that--and all the more as there was a kind of hunger in his
+look--the two men were for a minute directly confronted.  Marcher knew
+him at once for one of the deeply stricken--a perception so sharp that
+nothing else in the picture comparatively lived, neither his dress, his
+age, nor his presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep
+ravage of the features that he showed.  He _showed_ them--that was the
+point; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that was either a
+signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to an opposed sorrow.
+He might already have been aware of our friend, might at some previous
+hour have noticed in him the smooth habit of the scene, with which the
+state of his own senses so scantly consorted, and might thereby have been
+stirred as by an overt discord.  What Marcher was at all events conscious
+of was in the first place that the image of scarred passion presented to
+him was conscious too--of something that profaned the air; and in the
+second that, roused, startled, shocked, he was yet the next moment
+looking after it, as it went, with envy.  The most extraordinary thing
+that had happened to him--though he had given that name to other matters
+as well--took place, after his immediate vague stare, as a consequence of
+this impression.  The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief
+remained, making our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it
+expressed, what injury not to be healed.  What had the man _had_, to make
+him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?
+
+Something--and this reached him with a pang--that _he_, John Marcher,
+hadn't; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher's arid end.  No
+passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had
+survived and maundered and pined, but where had been _his_ deep ravage?
+The extraordinary thing we speak of was the sudden rush of the result of
+this question.  The sight that had just met his eyes named to him, as in
+letters of quick flame, something he had utterly, insanely missed, and
+what he had missed made these things a train of fire, made them mark
+themselves in an anguish of inward throbs.  He had seen _outside_ of his
+life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had
+been loved for herself: such was the force of his conviction of the
+meaning of the stranger's face, which still flared for him as a smoky
+torch.  It hadn't come to him, the knowledge, on the wings of experience;
+it had brushed him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of
+chance, the insolence of accident.  Now that the illumination had begun,
+however, it blazed to the zenith, and what he presently stood there
+gazing at was the sounded void of his life.  He gazed, he drew breath, in
+pain; he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had before him in sharper
+incision than ever the open page of his story.  The name on the table
+smote him as the passage of his neighbour had done, and what it said to
+him, full in the face, was that she was what he had missed.  This was the
+awful thought, the answer to all the past, the vision at the dread
+clearness of which he turned as cold as the stone beneath him.  Everything
+fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed; leaving him most of all
+stupefied at the blindness he had cherished.  The fate he had been marked
+for he had met with a vengeance--he had emptied the cup to the lees; he
+had been the man of his time, _the_ man, to whom nothing on earth was to
+have happened.  That was the rare stroke--that was his visitation.  So he
+saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the pieces fitted and fitted.  So
+_she_ had seen it while he didn't, and so she served at this hour to
+drive the truth home.  It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all
+the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion.  This the
+companion of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and she had then
+offered him the chance to baffle his doom.  One's doom, however, was
+never baffled, and on the day she told him his own had come down she had
+seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him.
+
+The escape would have been to love her; then, _then_ he would have lived.
+_She_ had lived--who could say now with what passion?--since she had
+loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it
+hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of
+her use.  Her spoken words came back to him--the chain stretched and
+stretched.  The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had
+sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill,
+wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had
+risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess.  It
+had sprung as he didn't guess; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned
+from him, and the mark, by the time he left her, had fallen where it
+_was_ to fall.  He had justified his fear and achieved his fate; he had
+failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of; and a moan
+now rose to his lips as he remembered she had prayed he mightn't know.
+This horror of waking--_this_ was knowledge, knowledge under the breath
+of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze.  Through them, none
+the less, he tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so
+that he might feel the pain.  That at least, belated and bitter, had
+something of the taste of life.  But the bitterness suddenly sickened
+him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of
+his image, what had been appointed and done.  He saw the Jungle of his
+life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as
+by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to
+settle him.  His eyes darkened--it was close; and, instinctively turning,
+in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the
+tomb.
+
+
+
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