The Beast in the Jungle .......................................................................................................................................1

Henry James .............................................................................................................................................1

What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their encounter scarcely matters, being

probably but some words spoken by himself quite without intentionspoken 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 outoftheway 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

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

herthat 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 establishmentalmost 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 shillingsit was impossible to look less so. Yet when she

finally drifted toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever so much olderolder 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

By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in one of the roomsremarkable for a fine

portrait over the chimney placeout 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 toopartly 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 disappointmentshe 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 miraclethe 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 Romeit had been at Naples; and it hadn't been eight

years beforeit 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 Romea 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

excavationthis incident had not occurred at the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occasion when

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 officefor from the moment he was so clever she had no proper right to himand 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 twentyfive; 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 buriedtoo deeply (didn't it seem?) to sprout

after so many years. Marcher could only feel he ought to have rendered her some servicesaved her from a

capsized boat in the bay or at least recovered her dressingbag, 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 whysince they seemed to know a certain number of the

same peopletheir 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 enoughwas 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 makebelieve with him that some passage of a romantic or critical kind HAD originally

occurred. He was really almost reaching out in imaginationas against timefor 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 linkthe link it was so odd he should

"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.

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

"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,"

"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 thanfrom the moment you have something in your mindnot know anything."

Still, however, she hesitated. "But if you've completely ceased to be that sort?"

"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

Then it was that, while he continued to stare, a light broke for him and the blood slowly came to his face,

"Do you mean I told you?" But he faltered, lest what came to him shouldn't be right, lest he should only

"It was something about yourself that it was natural one shouldn't forgetthat 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."

"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

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 himthat 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

"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 coining 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 hershe who had been made so by the graceless fact of his lapse of fidelity.

To tell her what he had told herwhat 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

She thought a moment. "It was perhaps because I seemed, as you spoke, to understand it."

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

"Well, say to wait forto 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 expectationor at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many peopleof

"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

"Do you mean because you've BEEN in love?" And then as he but looked at her in silence: "You've been in

"Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for thatI'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 yourselfsomething 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

He said this so lucidly and consistently that he could see it further impose itself. If she hadn't been interested

Evidently now too again he liked to talk of it. "I don't think of it aswhen it does comenecessarily

violent. I only think of it as natural and as of course above all unmistakeable. I think of it simply as THE

At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way to their gravity; it was as if the long look they exchanged held

"Do you think me simply out of my mind?" he pursued instead of answering. "Do I merely strike you as a

"You mean you feel how my obsessionpoor old thingmay correspond to some possible reality?"

"Then I don't know. And I should like to know," said John Marcher. "You'll tell me yourself whether you

"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 windup of their understanding. "I'll watch with you," said May Bartram.

The fact that she "knew"knew and yet neither chaffed him nor betrayed himhad 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 greataunt, 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 succeededthanks 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

Mss 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 largenot 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 headwaters of their stream, but had felt their boat pushed sharply off and down the

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 lightthat is to within reach of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privaciesthe

object of value the hidingplace 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, becausewell, 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 factthe fact

onlyof 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 connexionsomething 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 washe who had never been settled for an hour in his lifethey 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 goodthough possibly such rather colourlessmanners; this was why, above all, he

could regard himself, in a greedy world, as decentlyas in fact perhaps even a little sublimelyunselfish.

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 Mss 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 herthe very

highestought to proceed. He would thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her

requirements, her peculiaritieshe went so far as to give them the latitude of that namewould 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 tigerhunt. Such was the image under which he

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 naturalto 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 runsince it covered so much groundwas 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 himsince it had to pass with them for gaietyas 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 throughthose 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 repaidand 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 eyeholes 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 onceor perhaps it was only alternatelymeeting the eyes from in front and mingling her own

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 freshusually 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 habitor almostas 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 womento 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.

"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 concernedI'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

"Well, you're really so in with me, you knowas 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 andsince one may say

itinterested 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

May Bartram had a pause. "Do you ask that, by any chance, because you feel at all that yours isn't? I mean

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

lawthere 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 beenwell,

Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. "You say 'were to HAVE been,' as if in your heart

"Well," she said after another wait, "the matter with me is simply that I'm more sure than ever my curiosity,

They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, had turned once more about the little

drawingroom 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

countinghouses 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

"Oh yes, and you told me you didn't knowthat I was to see for myself. We've said little about it since, even

"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

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 ofthe 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."

It was what he would have liked indeed to call it. "I AM then a man of courage?"

He still, however, wondered. "But doesn't the man of courage know what he's afraid ofor 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 exposedhow shall I say?so directly. So intimately. That's surely enough."

"Enough to make you feel thenas what we may call the end and the upshot of our watchthat I'm not

"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

"Then why haven't you?" he asked. He had had, all along, today, the sense of her keeping something back,

and he still had it. As this was his first impression of that it 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 confessionit made him sure. "You know, and you're afraid to tell me. It's so bad that

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

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

dofind the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a sort with a woman no better than himselfhow

had she escaped it, and how could the alliance, such as it was, since they must suppose it had been more or

"I never said," May Bartram replied, "that it hadn't made me a good deal talked about."

"It hasn't been a question for me. If you've had your woman I've had," she said, "my man."

"I don't know why it shouldn't make mehumanly, which is what we're speaking ofas right as it makes

"I see," Marcher returned. "'Humanly,' no doubt, as showing that you're living for something. Not, that is, just

May Bartram smiled. "I don't pretend it exactly shows that I'm not living for you. It's my intimacy with you

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'rearen't you? no more than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like another. So if

She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough. "That's it. It's all that concerns meto help you

He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely. "How kind, how beautiful, you are to me! How shall

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 expressa 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 badtoo bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad that she was afraid

he might find it out, her reply had left the matter too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's special

sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch. He circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed

and widened and that still wasn't much affected by the consciousness in him that there was nothing she could

"know," after all, any better than he did. She had no source of knowledge he hadn't equally except of

course that she might have finer nerves. That was what women had where they were interested; they made

out things, where people were concerned, that the people often couldn't have made out for themselves. Their

nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram

was in particular that she had given herself so to his case. He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he had

never felt before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe some catastrophe that yet

wouldn't at all be the catastrophe: partly because she had almost of a sudden begun to strike him as more

useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an appearance of uncertainty in her health, coincident

and equally new. It was characteristic of the inner detachment he had hitherto so successfully cultivated and

to which our whole account of him is a reference, it was characteristic that his complications, such as they

were, had never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken about him, even to the point of making him ask

himself if he were, by any chance, of a truth, within sight or sound, within touch or reach, within the

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 himit

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 hershe 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 oldfashioned 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 sidehe 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 himselffor he HAD so doneREALLY 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

vainthis affected him sharply, and all the more because of his it 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 meanwhat, that is, did SHE mean, she and her vain waiting and her probable death and the

soundless admonition of it allunless 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 measuresuch, 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 unlookedfor 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 he associatedsince he wasn't

after all too utterly old to sufferif 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 leftthat he shouldn't have been "sold."

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 aspecthe could scarce have said

whyintensified 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 tooonly 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 itor rather

wasn't itthat 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

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 seasand. 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;

"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

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 lighta 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 yetthough even of this he was to take the full measure but

afterwardsand 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.

She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to look at him, yet it was rather as if she had lost the

"Why I thought it the point you were just makingthat 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

"Then the worstwe 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

"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.

These last words had affected her, he made out in a moment, exceedingly, and she spoke with firmness. "I've

"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

todayI'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.

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

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. "Assuredlyif you mean, as I do, something that includes all the loss and all the shame

"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

"No, no!" she repeated. "I'm with youdon't you see?still." And as to make it more vivid to him she rose

from her chaira movement she seldom risked in these daysand showed herself, all draped and all soft, in

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 showedas 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

It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced on him an extraordinary effect. "Well, what's

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 seeif I don't

She again shook her head. "What I mean isn't what I've always meant. It's different."

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

"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

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

She shook her head again. "However the case stands THAT isn't the truth. Whatever the reality, it IS a reality.

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 chimneypiece, 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 itit 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 staringthough he stared in fact but the harderturned off and regained

her chair. It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that.

She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunk back strangely pale. "I'm afraid I'm too

"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

"'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

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.

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,"

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 angryor

feeling at least that such a break in their custom was really the beginning of the endand 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 himto 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 solitudethat 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 herwhat 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

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.

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?"

He found himself again too helplessly at sea. "But come in the nightcome and passed me by?"

"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 coordinate, 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 your knowing it." His hand, as he leaned to her, was on the arm of her chair, and, dimly

"What I long ago said is true. You'll never know now, and I think you ought to be content. You've HAD it,"

"Why what was to have marked you out. The proof of your law. It has acted. I'm too glad," she then bravely

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

On this slowly she turned to him. "Did we ever dream, with all our dreams, that we should sit and talk of it

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

"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.

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 failedwhich he knew well enough without her. "Before?" he blankly echoed.

"Oh I don't care what comes now! Besides," Marcher added, "it seems to me I liked it better present, as you

"With the absence of everything." He had a dreadful sense of standing there before her forso far as

anything but this proved, this bottomless drop was concernedthe 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 crumbhow can the thing I've

She met him perhaps less directly, but she met him unperturbed. "You take your 'feelings' for granted. You

She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, that he stared an instantstared as if some light,

hitherto hidden, had shimmered across his vision. Darkness again closed over it, but the gleam had already

"Don't KNOWwhen you needn't," she mercifully urged. "You needn'tfor we shouldn't."

"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 lightthe light also of her wasted faceas meaning

ALL, and the sense of what knowledge had been for herself came over him with a rush which broke through

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 stillif 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

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 unattendedand for a reason he couldn't seizeby 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,

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 nownow 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 today, to talk to people at large of the Jungle cleared and confide to them that he now felt it as

safe, would have been not only to see them listen as to a 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.

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 lostwith everything elsea 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 himselfhe 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 mildnessnot, 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 happenedwell, 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 presencenot 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 livefeeding all on the sense that he once HAD lived, and dependent on it not alone for a

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 chancethe 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 fellowmortal. 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 thatand all the more as there was a kind of hunger in his lookthe two men were for a

minute directly confronted. Marcher knew him at once for one of the deeply strickena 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 themthat 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 tooof

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 himthough 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

Somethingand this reached him with a pangthat 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 vengeancehe 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

The escape would have been to love her; then, THEN he would have lived. SHE had livedwho 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 himthe 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 wakingTHIS 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 darkenedit was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself,