77>e Bŕwŕ m r&c Jungle 1 What determined the speech that startled him in the. course of their encounter scarcely matters, being' probably but some words spoken by himself quite without; intention—spoken as they lingered and slowly moved to? gether after their renewal of acquaintance. He had beert' conveyed by friends, an hour or two before, to the housed 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 motivej ■' a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic fea^ tures, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts, that made the place almost famous; and the great rooms were so nu-1' merous 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 perr; sons to be observed, singly or in couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners with their hands on theit'"; 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 oc-:; casion 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 dreaiij of acquisition at Weatherend would have had to be wild in-„i deed, and John Marcher found himself, among such sugi gestions, 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 to wander apart to feel in a proper relation with them, though his doing so was not, as happened, like the gloating of some of his Compaq ions, to be compared to the movements of a dog sniffing a 496 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 497 cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a direction that - was not to have been calculated. '■• It led, in short, in the course of the October afternoon, to -t 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 con-I-unued, 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 had not lost the thread. ' She had not 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 'r 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 sat-' fcfied, without in the least being able to say why, that this .-young lady might roughly have ranked in the house as a poor :telation; satisfied also that she was not there on a brief visit, 's 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 buildings, 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 Iguessing 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 498 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE were too stupid for. She was there on harder terms than any-., one; she was there as a consequence of things suffered, in; 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 theí; charm of it was that even before they had spoken they bad; practically arranged with each other to stay behind for talkU The charm, happily, was in other things too; it was partly ire:-' there being scarce a spot at Weathercnd without something to stay behind for. It was in the way the autumn day looked! into the high windows as it waned; in 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 the1 whole thing down, just take her mild attention for a part of» her general business. As soon as he heard her voice, howeveEjŕ 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 anifc years ago in Rome. I remember all about it." She confe to disappointment—she had been so sure he didn't; and «f prove how well he did he began to pour forth the particular recollections that popped up as he called for them. Her face5 and her voice, all at his service now, worked the miracle—th'qj impression operating like the torch of a lamplighter wh touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas jets Marcher flattered himself that the illumination was brilliant yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him, witi amusement, that in his haste to make everything right he hail-got most things rather wrong. It hadn't been at Rome—i had been at Naples; and it hadn't been seven years beforer^ it had been more nearly ten. She hadn't been either with he* uncle and aunt, but with her mother and her brother; in acfi dition to which it was not with the Pembles that be had been but with the Boyers, coming down in their company fro; THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 499 !Rome—a point on which she insisted, a little to his confusion, j'and as ro which she had her evidence in hand. The Boyers she ;.had known, but she 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 'Ihern for refuge into an excavation—this incident had not occurred at the Palace of the Carsars, but at Pompeii, on an 'occasion when they had been present there at an important Ttad. ■'ii'Hc 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 b a drawback that when all was made conformable to the truth 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 upon them. It had not taken ithem 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 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 thissed; the present one would have been so much better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn't been to stupidly meagre. There weren't, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in doming to pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities ;6f freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but -too deeply buried—too deeply (didn't it seem?) to sprout af-~ter so many years. Marcher said to himself that he ought to 'háve rendered her some service—saved her from a capsized boat in the Bay, or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched |rom her cab, in the streets of Naples, by a lazzarone with a 'stiletto. Or it would have been nice if he could have been 500 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE taken with fever, 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 litde 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, at that hour at 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 new incident would simply and rather awkwardly close. They would separate, and now for no second or for 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 such a mystery he should frivolously have managed to lose. "You know you told me something that 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, THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 501 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 he was even more surprised than ashamed. But the great thing was that he saw it was 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 reference. "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 / 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 just so all the more bear to know. Besides, perhaps I haven't." "Perhaps. Yet if you haven't," she added, "I should suppose you would 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------?" S02 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE But he faltered, lest what came to him shouldn't be right, les(' he should only give himself away. ^ "It was something about yourself that it was natural on'' shouldn't forget—that is if one remembered you at all. That's1 why I ask you," she smiled, "if the thing you then spoke of has ever come to pass?" ka{t Oh, then he saw, but he was lost in wonder and founi himself embarrassed. This, he also saw, made her sorry foi; him, as if her allusion had been a mistake. It took him but!»: moment, however, to feel that it had not been, much.as Í& had been a surprise. After the first little shock of it her know!*: edge on the contrary began, even if rather strangely, to tast"' sweet to him. She was the only other person in the world thetf; who would have it, and she had had it all these years, whitó the fact of his having so breathed his secret had unaccountably faded from him. No wonder they couldn't have met as if nothi ing had happened. "I judge," he finally said, "that I know; what you mean. Only I had strangely enough lost the coni sciousness 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 spokenf I've never, never repeated of you what you told me." She1' looked at him so that he perfectly believed her. Their eyes me over it in such a way that he was without a doubt. "And-* never will." y. She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost excessiv ; put him at ease about her possible derision. Somehow the whole question was a new luxury to him—that is, from th moment she was in possession. If she didn't take the ironi view she clearly took the sympathetic, and that was what htf 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 he and yet could profit perhaps exquisitely by the accident ~* having done so of old. "Please don't then. We're just riglť as it is." ': ,•; "Oh, I am," she laughed, "if you are!" To which sh* added: "Then you do still feel in the same way?" THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE SO? .ilt was impossible to him not to take to himself that she was teally interested, and it all kept coming as a sort of revelation. 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. ~b 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 atihim. 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------■?" :■]■ HOf 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. r'.She thought a moment. "It was perhaps because I seemed, as you spoke, to understand it." -3',"You do understand it?" he eagerly asked. I'iAgain she kept her kind eyes on him. "You still have the belief?" .-.."Oh!" he exclaimed helplessly. There was too much to say. '^'"Whatever it is to be," she clearly made out, "it hasn't yet tome." í He shook his head in complete surrender now. "It hasn't ýet- 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, Ťf I were." i, "It's to be something you're merely to suiter?" .fi "Well, say to wait for—to have to meet, to face, to see 'suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further SO+ THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all mji world and leaving me to the consequences, however they/ shape themselves." "ŕ She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for hini not to be that of mockery. "Isn't what you describe perhaps but the expectation—or, at any rate, the sense of danger, fy-y miliar to so many people—of falling in love?" ..?'; John Marcher thought. "Did you ask me that before?" J», "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. OP' 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, "thatii^ think that if it had been that, I should by this time know. "..If "Do you mean because you've been in love?" And then áš 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 affäir?% "Here I am, you see. It hasn't been overwhelming." , ž "Then it hasn't been love," said May Bartram. .iiř "Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that—I'W-taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it wa miserable," he explained. "But it wasn't strange. It wasn't^ what my affair's to be." r-, "You want something all to yourself—something that nof body 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, visibly, it fur ther imposed itself. If she had not been interested before she would have been interested now. "Is it a sense of comiiT violence?" : \ Evidently now too, again, he liked to talk of it. "I don; think of it as—when it does come—necessarily violent. I onĽ think of it as natural and as of course, above all, unmistake^ able. I think of it simply as the thing. The thing will of itse appear natural." "Then how will it appear strange?" Marcher bethought himself. "It won't—to me." ,> ■i THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 505 ;,,"To whom then?" V. "Well," he replied, smiling at last, "say to you." i,i"Oh then, I'm to be present?" ,.; "Why, you are present—since you know." ■l\'"l see." She turned it over. "But I mean at the catastrophe." )i,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." 4 "Are you afraid?" she asked. ?■.-"Don't leave me now" he went on. ;s»; "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?" jj "No," said May Bartram. "I understand you. I believe ■you:" ~:h "You mean you feel how my obsession—poor old thing!— ,rpay correspond to some possible reality?" ;yi "To some possible reality." ■H"Then you will watch with me?" 's...She hesitated, then for the third time put her question. *ifAre you afraid?" Í,-''Did I tell you I was—at Naples?" n.i.,"No, you said nothing about it." í;.-;"Then I don't know. And I should tófcťto 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 if for the full wind-up of their understanding. "I'll watch with you," said May Bartram. ''!)(■■■ Jhe.fact that she "knew"—knew and yet neither chaffed him nor betrayed him—had in a short time begun to con-istitute between them a sensible bond, which became mote ipatked when, within the year that followed their afternoon 506 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE at Weatherend, the opportunities for meeting multiplied. Th event that thus promoted these occasions was the death of uV ancient lady, her great-aunt, under whose wing, since losin her mother, she had to such an extent found shelter, and who, though but the widowed mother of the new successor to th property, had succeeded—thanks to a high tone and a hig temper—in not forfeiting the supreme position at the grea house. The deposition of this personage arrived but with h death, which, followed by many changes, made in particul a difference for the young woman in whom Marcher's expert attention had recognised from the first a dependent with Í-pride that might ache though it didn't bristle. Nothing for1 long time had made him easier than the thought that the1-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, whL indeed took time, she let him know that the happy issue wa at last in view. He had seen her again before that day, bo' because she had more than once accompanied the ancient lau to town and because he had paid another visit to the frien' who so conveniently made of Weatherend one of the charri of their own hospitality. These friends had taken him bac there; he had achieved there again with Miss Bartram some" quiet detachment; and he had in London succeeded in per suading her to more than one brief absence from her aunt; They went together, on these latter occasions, to the Nation Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, where, anion vivid reminders, they talked of Italy at large—not now at-, tempting to recover, as at first, the taste of their youth a~ their ignorance. That recovery, the first day at Weatheren" had served its purpose well, had given them quite enough; that they were, to Marcher's sense, no longer hovering abou the head-waters of their stream, but had felt their boat pushe' sharply off and down the current. They were literally afloat together; for our gentleman th' was marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause ofi was just the buried treasure of her knowledge. He had wi his own hands dug up this little hoard, brought to light—th" THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 507 .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 exquisite luck of having ■iigain just stumbled on the spot made him indifferent to any fether question; he would doubtless have devoted more time ii> the odd accident of his lapse of memory if he had not been moved to devote so much to the sweetness, the comfort, as .he felt, fór the future, that this accident itself had helped to keep fresh. It had never entered into his plan that anyone fehould "know," and mainly for the reason that it was not in Him to tell anyone. That would have been impossible, since nothing but the amusement of a cold world would have Waited on it. Since, however, a mysterious fate had opened his ftlbuth in youth, in spite of him, he would count that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost. That the right person 'Woitld know tempered the asperity of his secret more even han his shyness had permitted him to imagine; and May Bar-íram 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 ;fect—the fact only—of her interest in his predicament, from ;her mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard ;frinl as the runniest 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, after all, also a life of her own, with things that might Jiappen to her, things that in friendship one should likewise take1account of. Something fairly remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, in this connection—something represented by a certain passage of his consciousness, in the sud-.aénest 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 quiedy, holding his tongue about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect hpon his life, asking of them no allowance and only making ;on his side all those that were asked. He had disturbed nobody 5o8 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE with the queerness of having to know a haunted man, though he had had moments of rather special temptation on hearing people say that they were "unsettled." If they were as unset* tied 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 th ready, none the less, to be selfish just a little, since, surely, no'i more charming occasion for it had come to him. "Just-air"" tie," in a word, was just as much as Miss Bartram, taking on-day with another, would let him. He never would be in tHf least coercive, and he would keep well before him the lin$ on which consideration for her—the very highest—ought .t^ proceed. He would thoroughly establish the heads unde^ which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities—he went; so far as to give them the latitude ofthat name—would com*1' into their intercourse. All this naturally was a sign of he. 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 hint in the autumn light there at Weatherend. The real forraa" should have taken on the basis that stood out large was th„ form of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the verv basis itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction' his apprehension, his obsession, in short, was not a conditio he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of ľ was precisely what was the matter with him. Something t>~ other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of th' months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle: I signified little whether the crouching beast were destined ť slay him or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitabj spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from thatwS that a man of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 509 ;by, a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the image under which lne had ended by figuring his life. hi.'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 ready to give that he didn't expect, that lie .in fact didn't care always to be talking about it. Such a "eature in one's outlook was really like a hump on one's back. :Thte difference it made every minute of the day existed quite Jrtdependendy 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 uch would be predominantly the manner of their vigil. Yet "e.didn't want, at the same time, to be solemn; solemn was what he imagined he too much tended to be 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 ;úŕas doubtless in his mind, for instance, when he wrote pleas-íúntly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the great thing he had so 'ong felt as in the lap of the gods was no more than this ~rrc. «instance, which touched him so nearly, of her acquiring ^■house in London. It was the first allusion they had yet again Tpade, needing any other hitherto so little; but when she replied, after having given him the news, that she was by no jneans 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 )jttle, as time went by, that she was all the while looking at :jlis life, judging it, measuring it, in the light of the thing she knew, which grew to be at last, with the consecration of the Jjears, never mentioned between them save as "the real truth" „r(bout him. That had always been his own form of reference fp it, but she adopted the form so quietly that, looking back ' rthe end of a period, he knew there was no moment at which II,, was traceable that she had, as he might say, got inside his 4!i< 5IO THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE condition, 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 buf 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 likecf him in spite of it, and was practically, against the rest of th*' 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; whtc"" was precisely what enabled her to dispose the concealing.veit; in the right folds. She took his gaiety from him—since it haij to pass with them for gaiety—as she took everything else; buí she certainly so far justified by her unerring touch his fine" sense of the degree to which he had ended by convincing heri She at least never spoke of the secret of his life except as "th real truth about you," and she had in fact a wonderful wa£ of making it seem, as such, the secret of her own life tool That was in fine how he so constantly felt her as allowing ft#? him; he couldn't on the whole call it anything else. He all lowed for himself, but she, exacdy, allowed still more; parti' because, better placed for a sight of the matter, she traced hi' unhappy perversion through portions of its course into whicji' he could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt, but, besides knowing that, she knew how he looked as well; he knew eaof of the things of importance he was insidiously kept from dc*i' ing, but she could add up the amount they made, understand how much, with a lighter weight on his spirit, he might hav$ done, and thereby establish how, clever as he was, he fi short. Above all she was in the secret of the difference bé' tween the forms he went through—those of his little offi " under Government, those of caring for his modest patrimotf for his library, for his garden in the country, for the people f London whose invitations he accepted and repaid—and th detachment that reigned beneath them and that made of a behaviour, all that could in the least be called behaviour,* long act of dissimulation. What it had come to was that ^ wore a mask painted with the social simper, out of the cy:i holes of which there looked eyes of an expression not in tli THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE .Sil '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 inde-.scribable, 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. • i So, while they grew older together, she did watch with him, and so she let this association give shape and colour to her pwn existence. Beneath her forms as well detachment had learned to sit, and behaviour had become for her, in the social sense, a raise account of herself. There was but one account of her that would have been true all the while, and that she jould give, directly, to nobody, least of all to John Marcher. J;Her whole attimde was a virtual statement, but the perception of that only seemed destined 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 "(heir 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 ''tó the surface, and the auditor would then have wondered ndeed what they were talking about. They had from an early •time made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin that this gave them had fairly become tpne 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 ■tb 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 %t are especially concerned with is the turn it happened to take from her one afternoon when he had come to see her in 512 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE honour of her birthday. This anniversary had fallen on a Sun-, day, at a season of thick fog and general outward gloom; bur he had brought her his customary offering, having known htf: now long enough to have established a hundred little cm-; toms. It was one of his proofs to himself, the present he made, her on her birthday, that he had not sunk into real selfishness.',' It was mostly nothing more than a small trinket, but it wai 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'f most inveterate mark of men in general? Why, the capacity'«^ spend endless time with dull women—to spend it, I won't say without being bored, but without minding that they arei; 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." ., i. "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 one way and another,-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, at that." ' .;}'; She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too, but iď rather a different way. "Where other people, you mean, are? concerned?" ■:,•{; "Well, you're really so in with me, you know—as a sort oft result of my being so in with yourself. I mean of my having-, such an immense regard for you, being so tremendously grate:' ful for all you've done for me. I sometimes ask myself if k% quite fair. Fair I mean to have so involved and—since one mayi 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' wittf you, as we long ago agreed that I was to do, watching Is, always in itself an absorption." •$■ "Oh, certainly," John Marcher said, "if you hadn't had -your curiosity------! Only, doesn't it sometimes come to yot4*i THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 5IJ ■as time goes on, that your curiosity is not 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." "i;: 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 í the hands of one's law—there one is. As to the form the law i, iwill take, the way it will operate, that's its own affair." i;">i<''Yes," Miss Bartram replied; "of course one's fate is coming, of course it has come, in its own form and its own way, láli the while. Only, you know, the form and the way in your "-ose 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." V "Oh!" she vaguely protested. : must you have done." ^"Rather! I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else. I .Appear to myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing §ut dreadful things. A great many of them I've at different Ves named to you, but there were others I couldn't name." "'."They were too, too dreadful?" ,' "Too, too dreadful—some of them." SShe looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he jhet it an inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got heir full clearness, were still as beautiful as they had been in outh, only beautiful with a strange, cold light—a light that 'mehow was a part of the effect, if it wasn't rather a part Ť the cause, of the pale, hard sweetness of the season and the -ur. "And yet," she said at last, "there are horrors we have '" entioned." :Iťdeepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in ůchi a picture, talk of "horrors," but she was to do, in a few «mites, something stranger yet—though even of this he was '-..take the full measure but afterwards—and the note of it 'as already in the air. It was, for the matter ofthat, one of the signs that her eyes were having again such a high flicker f their prime. He had to admit, however, what she said. "Oh ; sphere were times when we did go far." He caught himself ■ the act of speaking as if it alt were over. Well, he wished it ere; and the consummation depended, for him, clearly, more nd more on his companion. ■But she had now a soft smile. "Oh, far------!" ilt was oddly ironic. "Do you mean you're prepared to go /rther?" She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to ' k at him, yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread. Do you consider that we went so far?" vl'Why, I thought it the point you were just making—that é had looked most things in the face." ^'Including each other?" She still smiled. "But you're quite ght. We've had together great imaginations, often great cars; but some of them have been unspoken." 52+ THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE "Then the worst—we haven't faced that. I could face it;! believe, if I knew what you think it. I feel," he explained, " if I had lost my power to conceive such things." And he wondered if he looked as blank as he sounded. "It's spent." "Then why do you assume," she asked, "that mine isn't?'/ "Because you've given me signs to the contrary. It isnifc question for you of conceiving, imagining, comparing. It isni a question now of choosing." At last he came out with i.'_ "You know something that I don't. You've shown me thai; before." These last words affected her, he could see in a moment,' remarkably, and she spoke with firmness. "I've shown you' my dear, nothing." ,m£ He shook his head. "You can't hide it." "Oh, oh!" May Bartram murmured over what she couldní hide. It was almost a smothered groan. ' ■ if "You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to your" of something you were afraid I would find out. Your answ1 was that I couldn't, that I wouldn't, and I don't pretends have. But you had something therefore in mind, and I' now that it must have been, that it still is, the possibility th-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 i norance now—I'm not afraid of knowledge." And then as fr a while she said nothing: "What makes me sure is that Tse" in your face and feel here, in this air and amid these appeals ances, that you're out of it. You've done. You've had yo experience. You leave me to my fate." .■■&» Well, she listened, motionless and white in her chany.asr she had in fact a decision to make, so that her whole marin was a virtual confession, though still with a small, fine, inne' stiffness, an imperfect surrender. "It would be the worst,', finally let herself say. "I mean the thing that I've never said*' It hushed him a moment. "More monstrous than all th monstrosities we've named?" "More monstrous. Isn't that what you sufficiently express;' she asked, "in calling it the worst?" Marcher thought. "Assuredly—if you mean, as I do, sortť' thing that includes all the loss and all the shame that a: thinkable." THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE SIS í ."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 nie.11 feel your beliefs are right. Therefore if, having this one, -'ou give me no more light on it, you abandon me." i'."No, no!" she repeated. "I'm with you—don't you see?— still." And as if to make it more vivid to him she rose from er chair—a movement she seldom made in these days—and howed herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slim-ňess. "I haven't forsaken you." 'Í 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 hov-Ved before him, to all the rest of her person, so that it was, 'for the minute; almost like a recovery of youth. He couldn't pity her for that; he could only take her as she showed—as .capable still 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 ;ihree or four things he wanted most to know; but the question that came of itself to his lips really covered the others. s"Then tell me if I shall consciously suffer." :,. She promptly shook her head. "Never!" ijilt confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced on him an extraordinary effect. "Well, what's better than that? Do you call that the worst?" .;, "You think nothing is better?" she asked. ;;. She seemed to mean something so special that he again ^sharply wondered, though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief. "Why not, if one doesn't know»" After which, as their eyes, over his question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened and something to his purpose came, prodigiously, out of her •very race. His own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the 'forehead, and he gasped with the force of a perception to .which, on the instant, everything fitted. The sound of his gasp .filled the air; then he became articulate. "I see—if I don't suffer!" Vln her own look, however, was doubt. "You see what?" / "Why, what you mean—what you've always meant." 52Ó THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE She again shook her head. "What I mean isn't what I've1 always meant. It's different." "It's something new?" , She hesitated. "Something new. It's not what you think. It, see what you think." ( His divination drew breath then; only her correction might" be wrong. "It isn't that í am 3 donkey?" he asked between* faintness and grimness. "It isn't that it's all a mistake?" í "A mistake?" she pityingly echoed. That possibility, for her,* he saw, would be monstrous; and if she guaranteed him the immunity from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in mind. "Oh, no," she declared; "it's nothing ofthat sort*. You've been right." 4 Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus' pressed, speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he shoul^ be most lost if his history should prove all a platitude. "Arei you telling me the truth, so that I sha'n't have been a bigge idiot than I can bear to know? I haven't lived with a vaiň' imagination, in the most besotted illusion? I haven't waited; but to see the door shut in my face?" ;i: She shook her head again. "However the case stands that-, isn't the truth. Whatever the reality, it is a reality. The dooťi isn't shut. The door's open," said May Bartram. "Then something's to come?" She waited once again, always with her cold, sweet eyes on* him. "It's never too late." She had, with her gliding step# diminished the distance between them, and she stood neare1 to him, close to him, a minute, as if still full of the unspoken,-Her movement might have been for some finer emphasis'of what she was at once hesitating and deciding to say. He hail-been standing by the chimney-piece, tireless and sparely adorned, a small, perfect old French clock and two morsels o', rosy Dresden constituting all its furniture; and her hand; grasped the shelf while she kept him waiting, grasped it a littl# as for support and encouragement. She only kept him waiting? however; that is he only waited. It had become suddenly, frorri: her movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him'thai she had something more to give him; her wasted face delj^ cately shone with it, and it glittered, almost as with the whjt" lustre of silver, in her expression. She was right, incontestable. THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 5^7 ,, 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 impon-■rderably pressing, and his stare all kind, but all expectant. The end, none the less, was that what he had expected failed to .sound. Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes. She gave way í it the same instant to a slow, fine shudder, and though he remained staring—though he stared, in fact, but the harder— she turned off and regained her chair. It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only ofthat. "Well, you don't say------?" She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and ;:had sunk back, strangely pale. "I'm afraid I'm too ill." . "Too ill to tell me?" It sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips, the fear that she would die without giving him light. He checked himself in time from so expressing his ques-ition, but she answered as if she had heard the words. I ■> "Don't you know—now?" ° -, " 'Now'------?" She had spoken as if something that had made a difference had come up 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 .lie must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience as to show that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his 'hands of the whole question. '. "Oh!" said May Bartram. \: "Are you in pain?" he asked, as the woman went to her. .■•:"No," said May Bartram. j^.Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which, however, he showed once more his ."mystification. "What then has happened?" ;;. She was once more, with her companion's help, on her feet, lind, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had found, blankly, his hat and gloves and had reached the door. Yet he waited for her answer. "What was to," she said. 528 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE V ii; 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, de$ feated and sore, almost angry—or feeling at least that such í break in their custom was really the beginning of the end4r and wandered alone with his thoughts, especially with one of. them that he was unable 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 starol 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 hinvand. least of a cold torment. She had deceived him to save him— to put him off with something in which he should be able to rest. What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after; all, but just this thing that had begun to happen? Her dying)', her death, his consequent solitude—that was what he had fig-'; ured as the beast in the jungle, that was what had been in th\ lap of the gods. He had had her word for it as he left her; forj what else, on earth, could she have meant? It wasn't a thing of a monstrous order; not a fate rare and distinguished; nots^ stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and immortalised; it had' only the stamp of the common doom. But poor Marcher,.^ 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 benčH' in the twilight. He hadn't been a fool. Something had'for»;; as she had said, to come. Before he rose indeed it had quite; struck him that the final fact really matched with the lo'ng" avenue through which he had had to reach it. As sharing his1 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. HÍ had lived by her aid, and to leave her behind would be cruelly!*; damnably to miss her. What could be more overwhelming7! than that? -ú Well, he was to know within the week, for though she:kep1; him a while at bay, left him restless and wretched during-"* THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 529 ; 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 put 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 :'tô-leáve their affair in order. "I'm not sure you understood. You've nothing to wait for more. It has come." 'í Oh, how he looked at her! "Really?" V'Really." r U "The thing that, as you said, was to?" ;'}r"The thing that we began in our youth to watch for." ■ iiFace 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?" t "Positive. Definite. I don't know about the 'name,' but, óh; with a date!" 'He found himself again too helplessly at sea. "But come in the night-—come and passed me by?" ",1 May Bartram had her strange, faint smile. "Oh no, it hasn't •passed you by!" iü"But if I haven't been aware of it, and it hasn't touched me—?" ii.■."Ah, your not being aware of it," and she seemed to hes-■'tate an instant to deal with this—"your not being aware of litis the strangeness in the strangeness. It's the wonder of'the wonder." She spoke as with the softness almost of a sick child, i yet now at last, at the end of all, with the perfect srraightness ;of a sibyl. She visibly knew that she knew, and the effect on ■Míň was of something co-ordinate, in its high character, with "the Jaw that had ruled him. It was the true voice of the law; so on her lips would the law itself have sounded. "It has 530 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE touched you," she went on. "It has done its office. Iťhä made you all its own." "So utterly without my knowing it?" "So utterly without your knowing it." His hand, as/ leaned to her, was on the arm of her chair, and, dimly sm: ing always now, she placed her own on it. "It's enough if know it." "V "Oh!" he confusedly sounded, as she herself of late so dftŕ had done. i» "What I long ago said is true. You'll never know now, an I think you ought to be content. You've had it," said Má^' Bartram. "But had what?" "Why, what was to have marked you out. The proof of you law. It has acted. I'm too glad," she then bravely added, ''t, have been able to see what it's not." . . He continued to attach his eyes to her, and with the serisr that it was all beyond him, and that she was too, he Wbuld; still have sharply challenged her, had he not felt it an abu, of her weakness to do more than take devoutly what éhé. gave him, take it as hushed as to a revelation. If hedi' speak, it was out of the foreknowledge of his loneliness:ť,; come. "If you're glad of what it's 'not,' it might then have? been worse?" . a She turned her eyes away, she looked straight before hk with which, after a moment: "Well, you know our fears."? 4 He wondered. "It's something then we never feared?" - fif. On this, slowly, she turned to him. "Did we ever dréám with all our dreams, that we should sit and talk of it thus?"'^ He tried for a little to make out if they had; but it was as., if their dreams, numberless enough, were in solution in some* thick, cold mist, in which thought lost itself. "It might have-been that we couldn't talk?" '.ji. "Well"—she did her best for him—"not from this sider 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 softly shook her head in. correction: "We mightn't, as it were, have got across------?"'!. "To where we are—no. We're here"—she made her weai^ emphasis. THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 531 '"And much good does it do us!" was her friend's frank "mment. s,"It does us the good it can. It does us the good that it Vt here. It's past. It's behind," said May Bartram. "Be- $re------" but her voice dropped. ! He had got up, not to tire her, but it was hard to combat is yearning. She after all told him nothing but that his light ad failed—which he knew well enough without her. "Be- ~k------?" he blankly echoed. '{!"Before, you see, it was always to come. That kept it 'iresent." Í!f'Oh, I don't care what comes now! Besides," Marcher dded, "it seems to me I liked it better present, as you say, kan I can like it absent with your absence." i;''Oh, mine!"—and her pale hands made light of it. :'ft"With the absence of everything." He had a dreadful sense ^f standing there before her for—so far as anything but this roved, this bottomless drop was concerned—the last time of eir life. It rested on him with a weight he felt he could scarce r, and this weight it apparently was that still pressed out ;hat remained in him of speakable protest. "I believe you; ;hut I can't begin to pretend I understand. Nothing, for me, is-past; nothing »»»7/ pass until I pass myself, which I pray my ■fars may be as soon as possible. Say, however," he added, "that I've eaten my cake, as you contend, to the last crumb— .hpw can the thing I've never felt at all be the thing I was ,,afked out to feel?" ";,She met him, perhaps, less directly, but she met him unperturbed. "You take your 'feelings' for granted. You were to 'Suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it." 'How in the world—when what is such knowledge but -suffering?" She looked up at him a while, in silence. "No—you don't 'understand." "I suffer," said John Marcher. "Don't, don't!" ■"How can I help at least thaťi" "Don't!" May Bartram repeated. ; ;< She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, .that he stared an instant—stared as if some light, hitherto 532 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE hidden, had shimmered across his vision. Darkness agar closed over it, but the gleam had already become for him idea. "Because I haven't the right------?" "Don't know—when you needn't," she mercifully urged' "You needn't—for we shouldn't." "Shouldn't?" If he could but know what she meant! "No—it's too much," "Too much?" he still asked—but with a mystification thaf was the next moment, of a sudden, to give way. Her wordsf if they meant something, affected him in this light—the light also of her wasted face—as meaning all, and the sense of what knowledge had been for herself came over him with a rush: which broke through into a question. "Is it of that, then£ you're dying?" ■-l- She but watched him, gravely at first, as if to see, with this;; where he was, and she might have seen something, or feared1 something, that moved her sympathy. "I would live for you still—if I could." Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn; into herself, she were, for a last time, trying. "But I can'tl'li-she said as she raised them again to take leave of him. 1, She couldn't indeed, as but too promptly and sharply ap-O peared, and he had no vision of her after this that was any-: thing but darkness and doom. They had parted forever in that strange talk; access to her chamber of pain, rigidly guarded,1* was almost wholly forbidden him; he was feeling now more-; over, in the face of doctors, nurses, the two or three relatives1*,; 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 everf 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 fea-; ture of features in his, for what else was it to have been so! indispensable? Strange beyond saying were the ways of exisf''■ tence, 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 con-., nection that anyone appeared obliged 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 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 5JJ ^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 ■Bärtram had taken in him. He couldn't quite have said what Je expected, but he had somehow not expected this approach ■to a double privation. Not only had her interest failed him, but he seemed to feel himself unattended—and for a reason .he couldn't sound—by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if nothing else, of the man markedly bereaved. It was as if, in the view of society, he had not been markedly bereaved, as if there still failed some sign or proof of it, and as • if, none the less, his character could never be affirmed, nor i'the deficiency ever made up. There were moments, as the rweeks went by, when he would have liked, by some almost ■aggressive act, to take his stand on the intimacy of his loss, in rder that it might be questioned and his retort, to the relief *(>f 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 ii-.bare horizon, he found himself wondering if he oughtn't to !have begun, so to speak, further back. ;!i'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 ithem both, as it were, away? He couldn't have made it known "she was watching him, for that would have published the su-'perstition of the Beast. This was what closed his mouth now— .now that the Jungle had been threshed to vacancy and that .the Beast had stolen away. It sounded too foolish and too flat; ithe difference for him in this particular, the extinction in his ■life of the element of suspense, was such in fact as 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 5J4 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE to fei-?), so to do this to-day, to talk to people at large of the jungle cleared and confide to them that he now felt it as safe; would have been not only to see them listen as to a goodwife's tale, but really to hear himself tell one. What it presently came-to in truth was that poor Marcher waded through his beateiv 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 missing it. He walked about in an existence that had grown strangely more spacious, and, stopping fitfully in places where the un'i dergrowth of life struck him as closer, asked himself yearn-i-' ingly, 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 was1' absolute and final: what was to happen had so absolutely anir 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 quesl tion 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; sh# 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 werf so many things, precisely, to deprive him of rest. It wasn't thäiŕ-he wanted, he argued for fairness, that anything that had hap* pened to him should happen over again; it was only that hi shouldn't, as an anticlimax, have been taken sleeping so soun as not to be able to win back by an effort of thought the lo ' stuff of consciousness. He declared to himself at moments thä" he would either win it back or have done with consciousn " for ever; he made this idea his one motive, in fine, made it š much his passion that none other, to compare with it, seeme1 ever to have touched him. The lost stuff of consciousness b came thus for him as a strayed or stolen child to an unap peasable father; he hunted it up and down very much as if h were knocking at doors and inquiring of the police. This lithe spirit in which, inevitably, he set himself to travel; THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 535 "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 Vhisway 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, ífound 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 fore--head against the fact of the secret they kept, drawing his ."'breath, while he waited as if, in pity of him, some sense would '"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 s'were like a pair of eyes that didn't know him. He gave them ^a last long look, but no palest light broke. ■it ■ k iHe stayed away, after this, for a year; he visited the depths of fAsia, spending himself on scenes of romantic interest, of su-'■perlative sanctity; but what was present to him everywhere was "''that for a man who had known what be 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 reflection, as a light 'that colouted and refined, a light beside which the glow of !the East was garish, cheap and thin. The terrible truth was idiat he had lost—with everything else—a distinction as well; ■the things he saw couldn't help being common when he had 'become common to look at them. He was simply now one of /them himself—he was in the dust, without a peg for the sense bf 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 She London suburb. That had become for him, and more intensely with time and distance, his one witness of a past glory. %'Was all that was left to him for proof or pride, yet the past 536 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE glories of Pharaohs were nothing to him as he thought of it/ Small wonder then that he came back to it on the morrow pf.' 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 cir^ cumference to the centre of his desert. He had settled to his" safety and accepted perforce his extinction; figuring to him-,'; self, with some colour, in the likeness of certain little old mení he remembered to have seen, of whom, all meagre and wizi! ened as they might look, it was related that they had in their' time fought twenty duels or been loved by ten princesseslf They indeed had been wondrous for others, while he was but' wondrous for himself; which, however, was exactly the cans«; of his haste to renew the wonder by getting back, as he might" put it, into his own presence. That had quickened his stepí,-* and cheeked 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 is 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 exíŕ perience, so that, strangely now, the place had lost for him its-mere blankness of expression. It met him in mildness—not/ as before, in mockery; it wore for him the air of conscious greeting that we find, after absence, in things that have closelj!: belonged to us and which seem to confess of themselves tol the connection. The plot of ground, the graven tablet, th$ tended flowers affected him so as belonging to him that h' quite felt for the hour like a contented landlord reviewing-' piece of property. Whatever had happened—well, had hap1' pened. He had not come back this time with the vanity q that question, his former worrying, "What, what}" now pra' tically so spent. Yet he would, none the less, never again » cut himself off from the spot; he would come back to it ever month, for if he did nothing else by its aid he at least held ú his head. It thus grew for him, in the oddest way, a positiv; resource; he carried out his idea of periodical returns, whir took their place at last among the most inveterate of his habits THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE JJ7 ,;What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that, in his now so simplified world, this garden of death gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most live. It was i as if, being nothing anywhere else for anyone, 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 fSeemed to wander through the old years with his hand in the ,itrm of a companion who was, in the most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self; and to wander, which was itňore extraordinary yet, round and round a third presence— 'oot wandering she, but stationary, still, whose eyes, turning ■■with his revolution, never ceased to follow him, and whose eyes, turning with his revolution, never ceased to follow him, and whose seat was his point, so to speak, of orientation. Thus "in short he settled to live—feeding only on the sense that he once bad lived, and dependent on it not only for a support but for an identity. i-V-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, in a quite pother direction, with a force beyond any of his impressions of Egypt or of India. It was a thing of the merest chance—the turn, as he afterwards felt, of a hair, though he was indeed to five to believe that if light hadn't come to him in this particular fashion it would still have come in another. He was to alive 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 bid from of old by his misery. With the light before him he knew that even of late his ache had only been smothered. It was strangely drugged, but it throbbed; at the touch it began to bleed. And the touch, in the event, was the face of a fellow- 538 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE mortal. This race, one grey afternoon when the leaves were' thick in the alleys, looked into Marcher's own, at the cemet tery, 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.1 person who so mutely assaulted him was a figure he had no£ ticed, 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 raci', alone forbade further attention, though during the time he-stayed he remained vaguely conscious of his neighbour, ä middle-aged man apparently, in mourning, whose bowed, back, among the clustered monuments and mortuary yewsj was constantly presented. Marcher's theory that these were" elements in contact with which he himself revived, had siifr fered, on this occasion, it may be granted, a sensible though, inscrutable check. The autumn day was dire for him as none, had recently been, and he rested with a heaviness he had noř yet known on the low stone table that bore May Bartram' name. He rested without power to move, as if some spring ijii him, some spell vouchsafed, had suddenly been broken fori 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 awak for? He stared before him with the question, and it was the": that, as one of the cemetery walks passed near him, he caugh the shock of the face. .. jj; His neighbour at the other grave had withdrawn, as he him-1 self, with force in him to move, would have done by now, an,) was advancing along the path on his way to one of the gates1 This brought him near, and his pace was slow, so that—an1" all the more as there was a kind of hunger in his look—th" two men were for a minute directly confronted. Marcher fe* him on the spot as one of the deeply stricken—a perceptip so sharp that nothing else in the picture lived for it, neith his dress, his age, nor his presumable character and das.;' nothing lived but the deep ravage of the features that tf showed. He showed them—that was the poiní; he was move as he passed, by some impulse that was either a signal fö sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to another sorrr/ THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE SJ9 ;He might already have been aware of our friend, might, at , some previous hour, have noticed in him the smooth habit of |he scene, with which the state of his own senses so scantly consorted, and might thereby have been stirred as by a kind .; of overt discord. What Marcher was at all events conscious of 'was, in the first place, that the imaged of scarred passion presented to him was conscious too—of something that profaned .-(he air; and, in the second, that, roused, startled, shocked, he ■:Was yet the next moment looking after it, as it went, with envy. The most extraordinary thing that had happened to ,him—though he had given that name to other matters as -well—took place, after his immediate vague state, as a ■consequence of this impression. The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder in :pity what wrong, what wound it expressed, what injury not .to be healed. What had the man had to make him, by the loss i of it, so bleed and yet live? >■. Something—and this reached him with a pang—that he, .'■John Marcher, hadn't; the proof of which was precisely John ; Marcher's arid end. No passion had ever touched him, for this ,;was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and 'pined, but where had been his deep ravage? The extraordinary thing we speak of was the sudden rush of the result of this question. The sight that had just met his eyes named to him, as in letters of quick flame, something he had utterly, insanely missed, and what he had missed made these things a train of »fire, made them mark themselves in an anguish of inward throbs. He had seen outside of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself; such was the force of his conviction of the meaning .of the stranger's face, which still flared for him like a smoky ;torch. It had not come to him, the knowledge, on the wings iof experience; it had brushed him, jostled him, upset him, •Vidi the disrespect of chance, the insolence of an 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 u-name on the table smote him as the passage of his neighbour 5+0 THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 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. Theij fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance-rť he had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of' his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to havai happened. That was the rare stroke—that was his visitation:^ So he saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the pieces fitted5 and fitted. So she had seen it, while he didn't, and so shei 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 al> a given moment perceived, and she had then offered him the. chance to baffle his doom. One's doom, however, was never,, baffled, and on the day she had told him that his own hadí come down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him. ■■j- The escape would have been to love her; then, then he: would have lived. She had lived—who could say now wit" what passion?—since she had loved him for himself; whereas' he had never thought of her (ah, how it hugely glared at him!^' but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use. Her spoken words came back to him, and the chain stretched ani. stretched. The beast had lurked indeed, and the beast, at its1-' hour, had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the coltf; April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhap1 even then recoverable, she had risen from her chair to stantl; before him and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as h 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 w$ to fall. He had justified his fear and achieved his fate; he ha failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of; andf moan now rose to his lips as he remembered she had praye*' he mightn't know. This horror of waking—this was knowf edge, knowledge under the breath of whichsthe very tears,?' his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less, tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so th-" THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE 541 he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had ■something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in ;the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done. .He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, .while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge 'and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened—it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, on his face, on the tomb.