The Beast in the Jungle
by Henry James
CHAPTER I
What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their
encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by
himself quite without intention--spoken as they lingered and slowly
moved together after their renewal of acquaintance. He had been
conveyed by friends an hour or two before to the house at which she
was staying; the party of visitors at the other house, of whom he
was one, and thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that he
was lost in the crowd, had been invited over to luncheon. There
had been after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of the
original motive, a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things,
intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts,
that made the place almost famous; and the great rooms were so
numerous that guests could wander at their will, hang back from the
principal group and in cases where they took such matters with the
last seriousness give themselves up to mysterious appreciations and
measurements. There were persons to be observed, singly or in
couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners with
their hands on their knees and their heads nodding quite as with
the emphasis of an excited sense of smell. When they were two they
either mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into silences of
even deeper import, so that there were aspects of the occasion that
gave it for Marcher much the air of the "look round," previous to a
sale highly advertised, that excites or quenches, as may be, the
dream of acquisition. The dream of acquisition at Weatherend would
have had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among
such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the presence of
those who knew too much and by that of those who knew nothing. The
great rooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him
that he needed some straying apart to feel in a proper relation
with them, though this impulse was not, as happened, like the
gloating of some of his companions, to be compared to the movements
of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a
direction that was not to have been calculated.
It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his
closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not
quite a remembrance, as they sat much separated at a very long
table, had begun merely by troubling him rather pleasantly. It
affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the
beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, as a
continuation, but didn't know what it continued, which was an
interest or an amusement the greater as he was also somehow aware--
yet without a direct sign from her--that the young woman herself
hadn't lost the thread. She hadn't lost it, but she wouldn't give
it back to him, he saw, without some putting forth of his hand for
it; and he not only saw that, but saw several things more, things
odd enough in the light of the fact that at the moment some
accident of grouping brought them face to face he was still merely
fumbling with the idea that any contact between them in the past
would have had no importance. If it had had no importance he
scarcely knew why his actual impression of her should so seem to
have so much; the answer to which, however, was that in such a life
as they all appeared to be leading for the moment one could but
take things as they came. He was satisfied, without in the least
being able to say why, that this young lady might roughly have
ranked in the house as a poor relation; satisfied also that she was
not there on a brief visit, but was more or less a part of the
establishment--almost a working, a remunerated part. Didn't she
enjoy at periods a protection that she paid for by helping, among
other services, to show the place and explain it, deal with the
tiresome people, answer questions about the dates of the building,
the styles of the furniture, the authorship of the pictures, the
favourite haunts of the ghost? It wasn't that she looked as if you
could have given her shillings--it was impossible to look less so.
Yet when she finally drifted toward him, distinctly handsome,
though ever so much older--older than when he had seen her before--
it might have been as an effect of her guessing that he had, within
the couple of hours, devoted more imagination to her than to all
the others put together, and had thereby penetrated to a kind of
truth that the others were too stupid for. She WAS there on harder
terms than any one; she was there as a consequence of things
suffered, one way and another, in the interval of years; and she
remembered him very much as she was remembered--only a good deal
better.
By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in one
of the rooms--remarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney-
place--out of which their friends had passed, and the charm of it
was that even before they had spoken they had practically arranged
with each other to stay behind for talk. The charm, happily, was
in other things too--partly in there being scarce a spot at
Weatherend without something to stay behind for. It was in the way
the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way
the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky,
reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old
tapestry, old gold, old colour. It was most of all perhaps in the
way she came to him as if, since she had been turned on to deal
with the simpler sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole
thing down, just take her mild attention for a part of her general
business. As soon as he heard her voice, however, the gap was
filled up and the missing link supplied; the slight irony he
divined in her attitude lost its advantage. He almost jumped at it
to get there before her. "I met you years and years ago in Rome.
I remember all about it." She confessed to disappointment--she had
been so sure he didn't; and to prove how well he did he began to
pour forth the particular recollections that popped up as he called
for them. Her face and her voice, all at his service now, worked
the miracle--the impression operating like the torch of a
lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas-
jets. Marcher flattered himself the illumination was brilliant,
yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him, with
amusement, that in his haste to make everything right he had got
most things rather wrong. It hadn't been at Rome--it had been at
Naples; and it hadn't been eight years before--it had been more
nearly ten. She hadn't been, either, with her uncle and aunt, but
with her mother and brother; in addition to which it was not with
the Pembles HE had been, but with the Boyers, coming down in their
company from Rome--a point on which she insisted, a little to his
confusion, and as to which she had her evidence in hand. The
Boyers she had known, but didn't know the Pembles, though she had
heard of them, and it was the people he was with who had made them
acquainted. The incident of the thunderstorm that had raged round
them with such violence as to drive them for refuge into an
excavation--this incident had not occurred at the Palace of the
Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occasion when they had been present
there at an important find.
He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, though the
moral of them was, she pointed out, that he REALLY didn't remember
the least thing about her; and he only felt it as a drawback that
when all was made strictly historic there didn't appear much of
anything left. They lingered together still, she neglecting her
office--for from the moment he was so clever she had no proper
right to him--and both neglecting the house, just waiting as to see
if a memory or two more wouldn't again breathe on them. It hadn't
taken them many minutes, after all, to put down on the table, like
the cards of a pack, those that constituted their respective hands;
only what came out was that the pack was unfortunately not perfect-
-that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them,
naturally, no more than it had. It had made them anciently meet--
her at twenty, him at twenty-five; but nothing was so strange, they
seemed to say to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn't
done a little more for them. They looked at each other as with the
feeling of an occasion missed; the present would have been so much
better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land,
hadn't been so stupidly meagre. There weren't, apparently, all
counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in
coming to pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities of
freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too
deeply buried--too deeply (didn't it seem?) to sprout after so many
years. Marcher could only feel he ought to have rendered her some
service--saved her from a capsized boat in the bay or at least
recovered her dressing-bag, filched from her cab in the streets of
Naples by a lazzarone with a stiletto. Or it would have been nice
if he could have been taken with fever all alone at his hotel, and
she could have come to look after him, to write to his people, to
drive him out in convalescence. THEN they would be in possession
of the something or other that their actual show seemed to lack.
It yet somehow presented itself, this show, as too good to be
spoiled; so that they were reduced for a few minutes more to
wondering a little helplessly why--since they seemed to know a
certain number of the same people--their reunion had been so long
averted. They didn't use that name for it, but their delay from
minute to minute to join the others was a kind of confession that
they didn't quite want it to be a failure. Their attempted
supposition of reasons for their not having met but showed how
little they knew of each other. There came in fact a moment when
Marcher felt a positive pang. It was vain to pretend she was an
old friend, for all the communities were wanting, in spite of which
it was as an old friend that he saw she would have suited him. He
had new ones enough--was surrounded with them for instance on the
stage of the other house; as a new one he probably wouldn't have so
much as noticed her. He would have liked to invent something, get
her to make-believe with him that some passage of a romantic or
critical kind HAD originally occurred. He was really almost
reaching out in imagination--as against time--for something that
would do, and saying to himself that if it didn't come this sketch
of a fresh start would show for quite awkwardly bungled. They
would separate, and now for no second or no third chance. They
would have tried and not succeeded. Then it was, just at the turn,
as he afterwards made it out to himself, that, everything else
failing, she herself decided to take up the case and, as it were,
save the situation. He felt as soon as she spoke that she had been
consciously keeping back what she said and hoping to get on without
it; a scruple in her that immensely touched him when, by the end of
three or four minutes more, he was able to measure it. What she
brought out, at any rate, quite cleared the air and supplied the
link--the link it was so odd he should frivolously have managed to
lose.
"You know you told me something I've never forgotten and that again
and again has made me think of you since; it was that tremendously
hot day when we went to Sorrento, across the bay, for the breeze.
What I allude to was what you said to me, on the way back, as we
sat under the awning of the boat enjoying the cool. Have you
forgotten?"
He had forgotten, and was even more surprised than ashamed. But
the great thing was that he saw in this no vulgar reminder of any
"sweet" speech. The vanity of women had long memories, but she was
making no claim on him of a compliment or a mistake. With another
woman, a totally different one, he might have feared the recall
possibly even some imbecile "offer." So, in having to say that he
had indeed forgotten, he was conscious rather of a loss than of a
gain; he already saw an interest in the matter of her mention. "I
try to think--but I give it up. Yet I remember the Sorrento day."
"I'm not very sure you do," May Bartram after a moment said; "and
I'm not very sure I ought to want you to. It's dreadful to bring a
person back at any time to what he was ten years before. If you've
lived away from it," she smiled, "so much the better."
"Ah if YOU haven't why should I?" he asked.
"Lived away, you mean, from what I myself was?"
"From what I was. I was of course an ass," Marcher went on; "but I
would rather know from you just the sort of ass I was than--from
the moment you have something in your mind--not know anything."
Still, however, she hesitated. "But if you've completely ceased to
be that sort--?"
"Why I can then all the more bear to know. Besides, perhaps I
haven't."
"Perhaps. Yet if you haven't," she added, "I should suppose you'd
remember. Not indeed that I in the least connect with my
impression the invidious name you use. If I had only thought you
foolish," she explained, "the thing I speak of wouldn't so have
remained with me. It was about yourself." She waited as if it
might come to him; but as, only meeting her eyes in wonder, he gave
no sign, she burnt her ships. "Has it ever happened?"
Then it was that, while he continued to stare, a light broke for
him and the blood slowly came to his face, which began to burn with
recognition.
"Do you mean I told you--?" But he faltered, lest what came to him
shouldn't be right, lest he should only give himself away.
"It was something about yourself that it was natural one shouldn't
forget--that is if one remembered you at all. That's why I ask
you," she smiled, "if the thing you then spoke of has ever come to
pass?"
Oh then he saw, but he was lost in wonder and found himself
embarrassed. This, he also saw, made her sorry for him, as if her
allusion had been a mistake. It took him but a moment, however, to
feel it hadn't been, much as it had been a surprise. After the
first little shock of it her knowledge on the contrary began, even
if rather strangely, to taste sweet to him. She was the only other
person in the world then who would have it, and she had had it all
these years, while the fact of his having so breathed his secret
had unaccountably faded from him. No wonder they couldn't have met
as if nothing had happened. "I judge," he finally said, "that I
know what you mean. Only I had strangely enough lost any sense of
having taken you so far into my confidence."
"Is it because you've taken so many others as well?"
"I've taken nobody. Not a creature since then."
"So that I'm the only person who knows?"
"The only person in the world."
"Well," she quickly replied, "I myself have never spoken. I've
never, never repeated of you what you told me." She looked at him
so that he perfectly believed her. Their eyes met over it in such
a way that he was without a doubt. "And I never will."
She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost excessive, put him
at ease about her possible derision. Somehow the whole question
was a new luxury to him--that is from the moment she was in
possession. If she didn't take the sarcastic view she clearly took
the sympathetic, and that was what he had had, in all the long
time, from no one whomsoever. What he felt was that he couldn't at
present have begun to tell her, and yet could profit perhaps
exquisitely by the accident of having done so of old. "Please
don't then. We're just right as it is."
"Oh I am," she laughed, "if you are!" To which she added: "Then
you do still feel in the same way?"
It was impossible he shouldn't take to himself that she was really
interested, though it all kept 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 her--she who had been made so by
the graceless fact of his lapse of fidelity. To tell her what he
had told her--what had it been but to ask something of her?
something that she had given, in her charity, without his having,
by a remembrance, by a return of the spirit, failing another
encounter, so much as thanked her. What he had asked of her had
been simply at first not to laugh at him. She had beautifully not
done so for ten years, and she was not doing so now. So he had
endless gratitude to make up. Only for that he must see just how
he had figured to her. "What, exactly, was the account I gave--?"
"Of the way you did feel? Well, it was very simple. You said you
had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you,
the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly
prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you,
that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of,
and that would perhaps overwhelm you."
"Do you call that very simple?" John Marcher asked.
She thought a moment. "It was perhaps because I seemed, as you
spoke, to understand it."
"You do understand it?" he eagerly asked.
Again she kept her kind eyes on him. "You still have the belief?"
"Oh!" he exclaimed helplessly. There was too much to say.
"Whatever it's to be," she clearly made out, "it hasn't yet come."
He shook his head in complete surrender now. "It hasn't yet come.
Only, you know, it isn't anything I'm to do, to achieve in the
world, to be distinguished or admired for. I'm not such an ass as
THAT. It would be much better, no doubt, if I were."
"It's to be something you're merely to suffer?"
"Well, say to wait for--to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly
break out in my life; possibly destroying all further
consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other
hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my
world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape
themselves."
She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not
to be that of mockery. "Isn't what you describe perhaps but the
expectation--or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so
many people--of falling in love?"
John Marcher thought. "Did you ask me that before?"
"No--I wasn't so free-and-easy then. But it's what strikes me
now."
"Of course," he said after a moment, "it strikes you. Of course it
strikes ME. Of course what's in store for me may be no more than
that. The only thing is," he went on, "that I think if it had been
that I should by this time know."
"Do you mean because you've BEEN in love?" And then as he but
looked at her in silence: "You've been in love, and it hasn't
meant such a cataclysm, hasn't proved the great affair?"
"Here I am, you see. It hasn't been overwhelming."
"Then it hasn't been love," said May Bartram.
"Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that--I've taken
it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was
miserable," he explained. "But it wasn't strange. It wasn't what
my affair's to be."
"You want something all to yourself--something that nobody else
knows or HAS known?"
"It isn't a question of what I 'want'--God knows I don't want
anything. It's only a question of the apprehension that haunts me-
-that I live with day by day."
He said this so lucidly and consistently that he could see it
further impose itself. If she hadn't been interested before she'd
have been interested now.
"Is it a sense of coming violence?"
Evidently now too again he liked to talk of it. "I don't think of
it as--when it does come--necessarily violent. I only think of it
as natural and as of course above all unmistakeable. I think of it
simply as THE thing. THE thing will of itself appear natural."
"Then how will it appear strange?"
Marcher bethought himself. "It won't--to ME."
"To whom then?"
"Well," he replied, smiling at last, "say to you."
"Oh then I'm to be present?"
"Why you are present--since you know."
"I see." She turned it over. "But I mean at the catastrophe."
At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way to their gravity;
it was as if the long look they exchanged held them together. "It
will only depend on yourself--if you'll watch with me."
"Are you afraid?" she asked.
"Don't leave me now," he went on.
"Are you afraid?" she repeated.
"Do you think me simply out of my mind?" he pursued instead of
answering. "Do I merely strike you as a harmless lunatic?"
"No," said May Bartram. "I understand you. I believe you."
"You mean you feel how my obsession--poor old thing--may correspond
to some possible reality?"
"To some possible reality."
"Then you WILL watch with me?"
She hesitated, then for the third time put her question. "Are you
afraid?"
"Did I tell you I was--at Naples?"
"No, you said nothing about it."
"Then I don't know. And I should like to know," said John Marcher.
"You'll tell me yourself whether you think so. If you'll watch
with me you'll see."
"Very good then." They had been moving by this time across the
room, and at the door, before passing out, they paused as for the
full wind-up of their understanding. "I'll watch with you," said
May Bartram.
