CHAPTER II
The fact that she "knew"--knew and yet neither chaffed him nor
betrayed him--had in a short time begun to constitute between them
a goodly bond, which became more marked when, within the year that
followed their afternoon at Weatherend, the opportunities for
meeting multiplied. The event that thus promoted these occasions
was the death of the ancient lady her great-aunt, under whose wing,
since losing her mother, she had to such an extent found shelter,
and who, though but the widowed mother of the new successor to the
property, had succeeded--thanks to a high tone and a high temper--
in not forfeiting the supreme position at the great house. The
deposition of this personage arrived but with her death, which,
followed by many changes, made in particular a difference for the
young woman in whom Marcher's expert attention had recognised from
the first a dependent with a pride that might ache though it didn't
bristle. Nothing for a long time had made him easier than the
thought that the aching must have been much soothed by Miss
Bartram's now finding herself able to set up a small home in
London. She had acquired property, to an amount that made that
luxury just possible, under her aunt's extremely complicated will,
and when the whole matter began to be straightened out, which
indeed took time, she let him know that the happy issue was at last
in view. He had seen her again before that day, both because she
had more than once accompanied the ancient lady to town and because
he had paid another visit to the friends who so conveniently made
of Weatherend one of the charms of their own hospitality. These
friends had taken him back there; he had achieved there again with
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 large--not now attempting to
recover, as at first, the taste of their youth and their ignorance.
That recovery, the first day at Weatherend, had served its purpose
well, had given them quite enough; so that they were, to Marcher's
sense, no longer hovering about the head-waters of their stream,
but had felt their boat pushed sharply off and down the current.
They were literally afloat together; for our gentleman this was
marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was just
the buried treasure of her knowledge. He had with his own hands
dug up this little hoard, brought to light--that is to within reach
of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privacies--the
object of value the hiding-place of which he had, after putting it
into the ground himself, so strangely, so long forgotten. The rare
luck of his having again just stumbled on the spot made him
indifferent to any other question; he would doubtless have devoted
more time to the odd accident of his lapse of memory if he hadn't
been moved to devote so much to the sweetness, the comfort, as he
felt, for the future, that this accident itself had helped to keep
fresh. It had never entered into his plan that any one should
"know", and mainly for the reason that it wasn't in him to tell any
one. That would have been impossible, for nothing but the
amusement of a cold world would have waited on it. Since, however,
a mysterious fate had opened his mouth betimes, in spite of him, he
would count that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost.
That the right person SHOULD know tempered the asperity of his
secret more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine; and
May Bartram was clearly right, because--well, because there she
was. Her knowledge simply settled it; he would have been sure
enough by this time had she been wrong. There was that in his
situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as a
mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact--the
fact only--of her interest in his predicament; from her mercy,
sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the
funniest of the funny. Aware, in fine, that her price for him was
just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably
spared, he was careful to remember that she had also a life of her
own, with things that might happen to HER, things that in
friendship one should likewise take account of. Something fairly
remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, in this
connexion--something represented by a certain passage of his
consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the other.
He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most
disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated
burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue
about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his
life, asking of them no allowance and only making on his side all
those that were asked. He hadn't disturbed people with the
queerness of their having to know a haunted man, though he had had
moments of rather special temptation on hearing them say they were
forsooth "unsettled." If they were as unsettled as he was--he who
had never been settled for an hour in his life--they would know
what it meant. Yet it wasn't, all the same, for him to make them,
and he listened to them civilly enough. This was why he had such
good--though possibly such rather colourless--manners; this was
why, above all, he could regard himself, in a greedy world, as
decently--as in fact perhaps even a little sublimely--unselfish.
Our point is accordingly that he valued this character quite
sufficiently to measure his present danger of letting it lapse,
against which he promised himself to be much on his guard. He was
quite ready, none the less, to be selfish just a little, since
surely no more charming occasion for it had come to him. "Just a
little," in a word, was just as much as 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 her--the very highest--ought to proceed. He
would thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her
requirements, her peculiarities--he went so far as to give them the
latitude of that name--would come into their intercourse. All this
naturally was a sign of how much he took the intercourse itself for
granted. There was nothing more to be done about that. It simply
existed; had sprung into being with her first penetrating question
to him in the autumn light there at Weatherend. The real form it
should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of
their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis
itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his
apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn't a privilege he could
invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely
what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for
him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years,
like a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether
the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The
definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the
definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause
himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the
image under which he had ended by figuring his life.
They had at first, none the less, in the scattered hours spent
together, made no allusion to that view of it; which was a sign he
was handsomely alert to give that he didn't expect, that he in fact
didn't care, always to be talking about it. Such a feature in
one's outlook was really like a hump on one's back. The difference
it made every minute of the day existed quite independently of
discussion. One discussed of course LIKE a hunchback, for there
was always, if nothing else, the hunchback face. That remained,
and she was watching him; but people watched best, as a general
thing, in silence, so that such would be predominantly the manner
of their vigil. Yet he didn't want, at the same time, to be tense
and solemn; tense and solemn was what he imagined he too much
showed for with other people. The thing to be, with the one person
who knew, was easy and natural--to make the reference rather than
be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather than be seeming to make
it, and to keep it, in any case, familiar, facetious even, rather
than pedantic and portentous. Some such consideration as the
latter was doubtless in his mind for instance when he wrote
pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the great thing he had so
long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more than this
circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her acquiring a house
in London. It was the first allusion they had yet again made,
needing any other hitherto so little; but when she replied, after
having given him the news, that she was by no means satisfied with
such a trifle as the climax to so special a suspense, she almost
set him wondering if she hadn't even a larger conception of
singularity for him than he had for himself. He was at all events
destined to become aware little by little, as time went by, that
she was all the while looking at his life, judging it, measuring
it, in the light of the thing she knew, which grew to be at last,
with the consecration of the years, never mentioned between them
save as "the real truth" about him. That had always been his own
form of reference to it, but she adopted the form so quietly that,
looking back at the end of a period, he knew there was no moment at
which it was traceable that she had, as he might say, got inside
his idea, or exchanged the attitude of beautifully indulging for
that of still more beautifully believing him.
It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him but as the
most harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run--since it
covered so much ground--was his easiest description of their
friendship. He had a screw loose for her but she liked him in
spite of it and was practically, against the rest of the world, his
kind wise keeper, unremunerated but fairly amused and, in the
absence of other near ties, not disreputably occupied. The rest of
the world of course thought him queer, but she, she only, knew how,
and above all why, queer; which was precisely what enabled her to
dispose the concealing veil in the right folds. She took his
gaiety from him--since it had to pass with them for gaiety--as she
took everything else; but she certainly so far justified by her
unerring touch his finer sense of the degree to which he had ended
by convincing her. SHE at least never spoke of the secret of his
life except as "the real truth about you," and she had in fact a
wonderful way of making it seem, as such, the secret of her own
life too. That was in fine how he so constantly felt her as
allowing for him; he couldn't on the whole call it anything else.
He allowed for himself, but she, exactly, allowed still more;
partly because, better placed for a sight of the matter, she traced
his unhappy perversion through reaches of its course into which he
could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt, but, besides knowing
that, she knew how he looked as well; he knew each of the things of
importance he was insidiously kept from doing, but she could add up
the amount they made, understand how much, with a lighter weight on
his spirit, he might have done, and thereby establish how, clever
as he was, he fell short. Above all she was in the secret of the
difference between the forms he went through--those of his little
office under Government, those of caring for his modest patrimony,
for his library, for his garden in the country, for the people in
London whose invitations he accepted and repaid--and the detachment
that reigned beneath them and that made of all behaviour, all that
could in the least be called behaviour, a long act of
dissimulation. What it had come to was that he wore a mask painted
with the social simper, out of the eye-holes of which there looked
eyes of an expression not in the least matching the other features.
This the stupid world, even after years, had never more than half
discovered. It was only May Bartram who had, and she achieved, by
an art indescribable, the feat of at once--or perhaps it was only
alternately--meeting the eyes from in front and mingling her own
vision, as from over his shoulder, with their peep through the
apertures.
So while they grew older together she did watch with him, and so
she let this association give shape and colour to her own
existence. Beneath HER forms as well detachment had learned to
sit, and behaviour had become for her, in the social sense, a false
account of herself. There was but one account of her that would
have been true all the while and that she could give straight to
nobody, least of all to John Marcher. Her whole attitude was a
virtual statement, but the perception of that only seemed called to
take its place for him as one of the many things necessarily
crowded out of his consciousness. If she had moreover, like
himself, to make sacrifices to their real truth, it was to be
granted that her compensation might have affected her as more
prompt and more natural. They had long periods, in this London
time, during which, when they were together, a stranger might have
listened to them without in the least pricking up his ears; on the
other hand the real truth was equally liable at any moment to rise
to the surface, and the auditor would then have wondered indeed
what they were talking about. They had from an early hour made up
their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin
allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.
Yet there were still moments when the situation turned almost
fresh--usually under the effect of some expression drawn from
herself. Her expressions doubtless repeated themselves, but her
intervals were generous. "What saves us, you know, is that we
answer so completely to so usual an appearance: that of the man
and woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit--or
almost--as to be at last indispensable." That for instance was a
remark she had frequently enough had occasion to make, though she
had given it at different times different developments. What we
are especially concerned with is the turn it happened to take from
her one afternoon when he had come to see her in honour of her
birthday. This anniversary had fallen on a Sunday, at a season of
thick fog and general outward gloom; but he had brought her his
customary offering, having known her now long enough to have
established a hundred small traditions. It was one of his proofs
to himself, the present he made her on her birthday, that he hadn't
sunk into real selfishness. It was mostly nothing more than a
small trinket, but it was always fine of its kind, and he was
regularly careful to pay for it more than he thought he could
afford. "Our habit saves you, at least, don't you see?" because it
makes you, after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other
men. What's the most inveterate mark of men in general? Why the
capacity to spend endless time with dull women--to spend it I won't
say without being bored, but without minding that they are, without
being driven off at a tangent by it; which comes to the same thing.
I'm your dull woman, a part of the daily bread for which you pray
at church. That covers your tracks more than anything."
"And what covers yours?" asked Marcher, whom his dull woman could
mostly to this extent amuse. "I see of course what you mean by
your saving me, in this way and that, so far as other people are
concerned--I've seen it all along. Only what is it that saves YOU?
I often think, you know, of that."
She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too, but rather in a
different way. "Where other people, you mean, are concerned?"
"Well, you're really so in with me, you know--as a sort of result
of my being so in with yourself. I mean of my having such an
immense regard for you, being so tremendously mindful of all you've
done for me. I sometimes ask myself if it's quite fair. Fair I
mean to have so involved and--since one may say it--interested you.
I almost feel as if you hadn't really had time to do anything
else."
"Anything else but be interested?" she asked. "Ah what else does
one ever want to be? If I've been 'watching' with you, as we long
ago agreed I was to do, watching's always in itself an absorption."
"Oh certainly," John Marcher said, "if you hadn't had your
curiosity -! Only doesn't it sometimes come to you as time goes on
that your curiosity isn't being particularly repaid?"
May Bartram had a pause. "Do you ask that, by any chance, because
you feel at all that yours isn't? I mean because you have to wait
so long."
Oh he understood what she meant! "For the thing to happen that
never does happen? For the Beast to jump out? No, I'm just where
I was about it. It isn't a matter as to which I can CHOOSE, I can
decide for a change. It isn't one as to which there CAN be a
change. It's in the lap of the gods. One's in the hands of one's
law--there one is. As to the form the law will take, the way it
will operate, that's its own affair."
"Yes," Miss Bartram replied; "of course one's fate's coming, of
course it HAS come in its own form and its own way, all the while.
Only, you know, the form and the way in your case were to have
been--well, something so exceptional and, as one may say, so
particularly YOUR own."
Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. "You say
'were to HAVE been,' as if in your heart you had begun to doubt."
"Oh!" she vaguely protested.
"As if you believed," he went on, "that nothing will now take
place."
She shook her head slowly but rather inscrutably. "You're far from
my thought."
He continued to look at her. "What then is the matter with you?"
"Well," she said after another wait, "the matter with me is simply
that I'm more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be
but too well repaid."
They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, had
turned once more about the little drawing-room to which, year after
year, he brought his inevitable topic; in which he had, as he might
have said, tasted their intimate community with every sauce, where
every object was as familiar to him as the things of his own house
and the very carpets were worn with his fitful walk very much as
the desks in old counting-houses are worn by the elbows of
generations of clerks. The generations of his nervous moods had
been at work there, and the place was the written history of his
whole middle life. Under the impression of what his friend had
just said he knew himself, for some reason, more aware of these
things; which made him, after a moment, stop again before her. "Is
it possibly that you've grown afraid?"
"Afraid?" He thought, as she repeated the word, that his question
had made her, a little, change colour; so that, lest he should have
touched on a truth, he explained very kindly: "You remember that
that was what you asked ME long ago--that first day at Weatherend."
"Oh yes, and you told me you didn't know--that I was to see for
myself. We've said little about it since, even in so long a time."
"Precisely," Marcher interposed--"quite as if it were too delicate
a matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might find, on
pressure, that I AM afraid. For then," he said, "we shouldn't,
should we? quite know what to do."
She had for the time no answer to this question. "There have been
days when I thought you were. Only, of course," she added, "there
have been days when we have thought almost anything."
"Everything. Oh!" Marcher softly groaned, as with a gasp, half
spent, at the face, more uncovered just then than it had been for a
long while, of the imagination always with them. It had always had
it's incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as with the very
eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to them, they could
still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that rose from the depths
of his being. All they had thought, first and last, rolled over
him; the past seemed to have been reduced to mere barren
speculation. This in fact was what the place had just struck him
as so full of--the simplification of everything but the state of
suspense. That remained only by seeming to hang in the void
surrounding it. Even his original fear, if fear it as had been,
had lost itself in the desert. "I judge, however," he continued,
"that you see I'm not afraid now."
"What I see, as I make it out, is that you've achieved something
almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living
with it so long and so closely you've lost your sense of it; you
know it's there, but you're indifferent, and you cease even, as of
old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the danger
is," May Bartram wound up, "I'm bound to say I don't think your
attitude could well be surpassed."
John Marcher faintly smiled. "It's heroic?"
"Certainly--call it that."
It was what he would have liked indeed to call it. "I AM then a
man of courage?"
"That's what you were to show me."
He still, however, wondered. "But doesn't the man of courage know
what he's afraid of--or not afraid of? I don't know THAT, you see.
I don't focus it. I can't name it. I only know I'm exposed."
"Yes, but exposed--how shall I say?--so directly. So intimately.
That's surely enough."
"Enough to make you feel then--as what we may call the end and the
upshot of our watch--that I'm not afraid?"
"You're not afraid. But it isn't," she said, "the end of our
watch. That is it isn't the end of yours. You've everything still
to see."
"Then why haven't you?" he asked. He had had, all along, to-day,
the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had it. As
this was his first impression of that it quite made a date. The
case was the more marked as she didn't at first answer; which in
turn made him go on. "You know something I don't." Then his
voice, for that of a man of courage, trembled a little. "You know
what's to happen." Her silence, with the face she showed, was
almost a confession--it made him sure. "You know, and you're
afraid to tell me. It's so bad that you're afraid I'll find out."
All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to
her, he had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly drawn
round her. Yet she might, after all, not have worried; and the
real climax was that he himself, at all events, needn't. "You'll
never find out."
