The Beast in the Jungle

H >> Henry James >> The Beast in the Jungle


"Before you see, it was always to _come_. That kept it present."

"Oh I don't care what comes now! Besides," Marcher added, "it seems to
me I liked it better present, as you say, than I can like it absent with
_your_ absence."

"Oh mine!"--and her pale hands made light of it.

"With the absence of everything." He had a dreadful sense of standing
there before her for--so far as anything but this proved, this bottomless
drop was concerned--the last time of their life. It rested on him with a
weight he felt he could scarce bear, and this weight it apparently was
that still pressed out what remained in him of speakable protest. "I
believe you; but I can't begin to pretend I understand. _Nothing_, for
me, is past; nothing _will_ pass till I pass myself, which I pray my
stars may be as soon as possible. Say, however," he added, "that I've
eaten my cake, as you contend, to the last crumb--how can the thing I've
never felt at all be the thing I was marked out to feel?"

She met him perhaps less directly, but she met him unperturbed. "You
take your 'feelings' for granted. You were to suffer your fate. That
was not necessarily to know it."

"How in the world--when what is such knowledge but suffering?"

She looked up at him a while in silence. "No--you don't understand."

"I suffer," said John Marcher.

"Don't, don't!"

"How can I help at least _that_?"

"_Don't_!" May Bartram repeated.

She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, that he
stared an instant--stared as if some light, hitherto hidden, had
shimmered across his vision. Darkness again closed over it, but the
gleam had already become for him an idea. "Because I haven't the
right--?"

"Don't _know_--when you needn't," she mercifully urged. "You needn't--for
we shouldn't."

"Shouldn't?" If he could but know what she meant!

"No-- it's too much."

"Too much?" he still asked but with a mystification that was the next
moment of a sudden to give way. Her words, if they meant something,
affected him in this light--the light also of her wasted face--as meaning
_all_, and the sense of what knowledge had been for herself came over him
with a rush which broke through into a question. "Is it of that then
you're dying?"

She but watched him, gravely at first, as to see, with this, where he
was, and she might have seen something or feared something that moved her
sympathy. "I would live for you still--if I could." Her eyes closed for
a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying.
"But I can't!" she said as she raised them again to take leave of him.

She couldn't indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared, and he had
no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom. They
had parted for ever in that strange talk; access to her chamber of pain,
rigidly guarded, was almost wholly forbidden him; he was feeling now
moreover, in the face of doctors, nurses, the two or three relatives
attracted doubtless by the presumption of what she had to "leave," how
few were the rights, as they were called in such cases, that he had to
put forward, and how odd it might even seem that their intimacy shouldn't
have given him more of them. The stupidest fourth cousin had more, even
though she had been nothing in such a person's life. She had been a
feature of features in _his_, for what else was it to have been so
indispensable? Strange beyond saying were the ways of existence,
baffling for him the anomaly of his lack, as he felt it to be, of
producible claim. A woman might have been, as it were, everything to
him, and it might yet present him, in no connexion that any one seemed
held to recognise. If this was the case in these closing weeks it was
the case more sharply on the occasion of the last offices rendered, in
the great grey London cemetery, to what had been mortal, to what had been
precious, in his friend. The concourse at her grave was not numerous,
but he saw himself treated as scarce more nearly concerned with it than
if there had been a thousand others. He was in short from this moment
face to face with the fact that he was to profit extraordinarily little
by the interest May Bartram had taken in him. He couldn't quite have
said what he expected, but he hadn't surely expected this approach to a
double privation. Not only had her interest failed him, but he seemed to
feel himself unattended--and for a reason he couldn't seize--by the
distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if nothing else, of the man
markedly bereaved. It was as if, in the view of society he had not
_been_ markedly bereaved, as if there still failed some sign or proof of
it, and as if none the less his character could never be affirmed nor the
deficiency ever made up. There were moments as the weeks went by when he
would have liked, by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the
intimacy of his loss, in order that it _might_ be questioned and his
retort, to the relief of his spirit, so recorded; but the moments of an
irritation more helpless followed fast on these, the moments during
which, turning things over with a good conscience but with a bare
horizon, he found himself wondering if he oughtn't to have begun, so to
speak, further back.

He found himself wondering indeed at many things, and this last
speculation had others to keep it company. What could he have done,
after all, in her lifetime, without giving them both, as it were, away?
He couldn't have made known she was watching him, for that would have
published the superstition of the Beast. This was what closed his mouth
now--now that the Jungle had been thrashed to vacancy and that the Beast
had stolen away. It sounded too foolish and too flat; the difference for
him in this particular, the extinction in his life of the element of
suspense, was such as in fact to surprise him. He could scarce have said
what the effect resembled; the abrupt cessation, the positive
prohibition, of music perhaps, more than anything else, in some place all
adjusted and all accustomed to sonority and to attention. If he could at
any rate have conceived lifting the veil from his image at some moment of
the past (what had he done, after all, if not lift it to _her_?) so to do
this to-day, to talk to people at large of the Jungle cleared and confide
to them that he now felt it as safe, would have been not only to see them
listen as to a goodwife's tale, but really to hear himself tell one. What
it presently came to in truth was that poor Marcher waded through his
beaten grass, where no life stirred, where no breath sounded, where no
evil eye seemed to gleam from a possible lair, very much as if vaguely
looking for the Beast, and still more as if acutely missing it. He
walked about in an existence that had grown strangely more spacious, and,
stopping fitfully in places where the undergrowth of life struck him as
closer, asked himself yearningly, wondered secretly and sorely, if it
would have lurked here or there. It would have at all events sprung;
what was at least complete was his belief in the truth itself of the
assurance given him. The change from his old sense to his new was
absolute and final: what was to happen had so absolutely and finally
happened that he was as little able to know a fear for his future as to
know a hope; so absent in short was any question of anything still to
come. He was to live entirely with the other question, that of his
unidentified past, that of his having to see his fortune impenetrably
muffled and masked.

The torment of this vision became then his occupation; he couldn't
perhaps have consented to live but for the possibility of guessing. She
had told him, his friend, not to guess; she had forbidden him, so far as
he might, to know, and she had even in a sort denied the power in him to
learn: which were so many things, precisely, to deprive him of rest. It
wasn't that he wanted, he argued for fairness, that anything past and
done should repeat itself; it was only that he shouldn't, as an
anticlimax, have been taken sleeping so sound as not to be able to win
back by an effort of thought the lost stuff of consciousness. He
declared to himself at moments that he would either win it back or have
done with consciousness for ever; he made this idea his one motive in
fine, made it so much his passion that none other, to compare with it,
seemed ever to have touched him. The lost stuff of consciousness became
thus for him as a strayed or stolen child to an unappeasable father; he
hunted it up and down very much as if he were knocking at doors and
enquiring of the police. This was the spirit in which, inevitably, he
set himself to travel; he started on a journey that was to be as long as
he could make it; it danced before him that, as the other side of the
globe couldn't possibly have less to say to him, it might, by a
possibility of suggestion, have more. Before he quitted London, however,
he made a pilgrimage to May Bartram's grave, took his way to it through
the endless avenues of the grim suburban necropolis, sought it out in the
wilderness of tombs, and, though he had come but for the renewal of the
act of farewell, found himself, when he had at last stood by it, beguiled
into long intensities. He stood for an hour, powerless to turn away and
yet powerless to penetrate the darkness of death; fixing with his eyes
her inscribed name and date, beating his forehead against the fact of the
secret they kept, drawing his breath, while he waited, as if some sense
would in pity of him rise from the stones. He kneeled on the stones,
however, in vain; they kept what they concealed; and if the face of the
tomb did become a face for him it was because her two names became a pair
of eyes that didn't know him. He gave them a last long look, but no
palest light broke.




CHAPTER VI


He stayed away, after this, for a year; he visited the depths of Asia,
spending himself on scenes of romantic interest, of superlative sanctity;
but what was present to him everywhere was that for a man who had known
what _he_ had known the world was vulgar and vain. The state of mind in
which he had lived for so many years shone out to him, in reflexion, as a
light that coloured and refined, a light beside which the glow of the
East was garish cheap and thin. The terrible truth was that he had
lost--with everything else--a distinction as well the things he saw
couldn't help being common when he had become common to look at them. He
was simply now one of them himself--he was in the dust, without a peg for
the sense of difference; and there were hours when, before the temples of
gods and the sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned for nobleness of
association to the barely discriminated slab in the London suburb. That
had become for him, and more intensely with time and distance, his one
witness of a past glory. It was all that was left to him for proof or
pride, yet the past glories of Pharaohs were nothing to him as he thought
of it. Small wonder then that he came back to it on the morrow of his
return. He was drawn there this time as irresistibly as the other, yet
with a confidence, almost, that was doubtless the effect of the many
months that had elapsed. He had lived, in spite of himself, into his
change of feeling, and in wandering over the earth had wandered, as might
be said, from the circumference to the centre of his desert. He had
settled to his safety and accepted perforce his extinction; figuring to
himself, with some colour, in the likeness of certain little old men he
remembered to have seen, of whom, all meagre and wizened as they might
look, it was related that they had in their time fought twenty duels or
been loved by ten princesses. They indeed had been wondrous for others
while he was but wondrous for himself; which, however, was exactly the
cause of his haste to renew the wonder by getting back, as he might put
it, into his own presence. That had quickened his steps and checked his
delay. If his visit was prompt it was because he had been separated so
long from the part of himself that alone he now valued.

It's accordingly not false to say that he reached his goal with a certain
elation and stood there again with a certain assurance. The creature
beneath the sod knew of his rare experience, so that, strangely now, the
place had lost for him its mere blankness of expression. It met him in
mildness--not, as before, in mockery; it wore for him the air of
conscious greeting that we find, after absence, in things that have
closely belonged to us and which seem to confess of themselves to the
connexion. The plot of ground, the graven tablet, the tended flowers
affected him so as belonging to him that he resembled for the hour a
contented landlord reviewing a piece of property. Whatever had
happened--well, had happened. He had not come back this time with the
vanity of that question, his former worrying "What, _what_?" now
practically so spent. Yet he would none the less never again so cut
himself off from the spot; he would come back to it every month, for if
he did nothing else by its aid he at least held up his head. It thus
grew for him, in the oddest way, a positive resource; he carried out his
idea of periodical returns, which took their place at last among the most
inveterate of his habits. What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was
that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death gave him the
few square feet of earth on which he could still most live. It was as
if, being nothing anywhere else for any one, nothing even for himself, he
were just everything here, and if not for a crowd of witnesses or indeed
for any witness but John Marcher, then by clear right of the register
that he could scan like an open page. The open page was the tomb of his
friend, and there were the facts of the past, there the truth of his
life, there the backward reaches in which he could lose himself. He did
this from time to time with such effect that he seemed to wander through
the old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who was, in the
most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self; and to wander,
which was more extraordinary yet, round and round a third presence--not
wandering she, but stationary, still, whose eyes, turning with his
revolution, never ceased to follow him, and whose seat was his point, so
to speak, of orientation. Thus in short he settled to live--feeding all
on the sense that he once _had_ lived, and dependent on it not alone for
a support but for an identity.

It sufficed him in its way for months and the year elapsed; it would
doubtless even have carried him further but for an accident,
superficially slight, which moved him, quite in another direction, with a
force beyond any of his impressions of Egypt or of India. It was a thing
of the merest chance--the turn, as he afterwards felt, of a hair, though
he was indeed to live to believe that if light hadn't come to him in this
particular fashion it would still have come in another. He was to live
to believe this, I say, though he was not to live, I may not less
definitely mention, to do much else. We allow him at any rate the
benefit of the conviction, struggling up for him at the end, that,
whatever might have happened or not happened, he would have come round of
himself to the light. The incident of an autumn day had put the match to
the train laid from of old by his misery. With the light before him he
knew that even of late his ache had only been smothered. It was
strangely drugged, but it throbbed; at the touch it began to bleed. And
the touch, in the event, was the face of a fellow-mortal. This face, one
grey afternoon when the leaves were thick in the alleys, looked into
Marcher's own, at the cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a
blade. He felt it, that is, so deep down that he winced at the steady
thrust. The person who so mutely assaulted him was a figure he had
noticed, on reaching his own goal, absorbed by a grave a short distance
away, a grave apparently fresh, so that the emotion of the visitor would
probably match it for frankness. This fact alone forbade further
attention, though during the time he stayed he remained vaguely conscious
of his neighbour, a middle-aged man apparently, in mourning, whose bowed
back, among the clustered monuments and mortuary yews, was constantly
presented. Marcher's theory that these were elements in contact with
which he himself revived, had suffered, on this occasion, it may be
granted, a marked, an excessive check. The autumn day was dire for him
as none had recently been, and he rested with a heaviness he had not yet
known on the low stone table that bore May Bartram's name. He rested
without power to move, as if some spring in him, some spell vouchsafed,
had suddenly been broken for ever. If he could have done that moment as
he wanted he would simply have stretched himself on the slab that was
ready to take him, treating it as a place prepared to receive his last
sleep. What in all the wide world had he now to keep awake for? He
stared before him with the question, and it was then that, as one of the
cemetery walks passed near him, he caught the shock of the face.

His neighbour at the other grave had withdrawn, as he himself, with force
enough in him, would have done by now, and was advancing along the path
on his way to one of the gates. This brought him close, and his pace,
was slow, so that--and all the more as there was a kind of hunger in his
look--the two men were for a minute directly confronted. Marcher knew
him at once for one of the deeply stricken--a perception so sharp that
nothing else in the picture comparatively lived, neither his dress, his
age, nor his presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep
ravage of the features that he showed. He _showed_ them--that was the
point; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that was either a
signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to an opposed sorrow.
He might already have been aware of our friend, might at some previous
hour have noticed in him the smooth habit of the scene, with which the
state of his own senses so scantly consorted, and might thereby have been
stirred as by an overt discord. What Marcher was at all events conscious
of was in the first place that the image of scarred passion presented to
him was conscious too--of something that profaned the air; and in the
second that, roused, startled, shocked, he was yet the next moment
looking after it, as it went, with envy. The most extraordinary thing
that had happened to him--though he had given that name to other matters
as well--took place, after his immediate vague stare, as a consequence of
this impression. The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief
remained, making our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it
expressed, what injury not to be healed. What had the man _had_, to make
him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?

Something--and this reached him with a pang--that _he_, John Marcher,
hadn't; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher's arid end. No
passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had
survived and maundered and pined, but where had been _his_ deep ravage?
The extraordinary thing we speak of was the sudden rush of the result of
this question. The sight that had just met his eyes named to him, as in
letters of quick flame, something he had utterly, insanely missed, and
what he had missed made these things a train of fire, made them mark
themselves in an anguish of inward throbs. He had seen _outside_ of his
life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had
been loved for herself: such was the force of his conviction of the
meaning of the stranger's face, which still flared for him as a smoky
torch. It hadn't come to him, the knowledge, on the wings of experience;
it had brushed him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of
chance, the insolence of accident. Now that the illumination had begun,
however, it blazed to the zenith, and what he presently stood there
gazing at was the sounded void of his life. He gazed, he drew breath, in
pain; he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had before him in sharper
incision than ever the open page of his story. The name on the table
smote him as the passage of his neighbour had done, and what it said to
him, full in the face, was that she was what he had missed. This was the
awful thought, the answer to all the past, the vision at the dread
clearness of which he turned as cold as the stone beneath him. Everything
fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed; leaving him most of all
stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The fate he had been marked
for he had met with a vengeance--he had emptied the cup to the lees; he
had been the man of his time, _the_ man, to whom nothing on earth was to
have happened. That was the rare stroke--that was his visitation. So he
saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the pieces fitted and fitted. So
_she_ had seen it while he didn't, and so she served at this hour to
drive the truth home. It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all
the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion. This the
companion of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and she had then
offered him the chance to baffle his doom. One's doom, however, was
never baffled, and on the day she told him his own had come down she had
seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him.

The escape would have been to love her; then, _then_ he would have lived.
_She_ had lived--who could say now with what passion?--since she had
loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it
hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of
her use. Her spoken words came back to him--the chain stretched and
stretched. The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had
sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill,
wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had
risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess. It
had sprung as he didn't guess; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned
from him, and the mark, by the time he left her, had fallen where it
_was_ to fall. He had justified his fear and achieved his fate; he had
failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of; and a moan
now rose to his lips as he remembered she had prayed he mightn't know.
This horror of waking--_this_ was knowledge, knowledge under the breath
of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none
the less, he tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so
that he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had
something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened
him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of
his image, what had been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his
life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as
by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to
settle him. His eyes darkened--it was close; and, instinctively turning,
in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the
tomb.