The Beast in the Jungle - Генри Джеймс

Henry James

The Beast in the Jungle

CHAPTER I

What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by himself quite without intentionspoken as they lingered and slowly moved together after their renewal of acquaintance.  He had been conveyed by friends an hour or two before to the house at which she was staying; the party of visitors at the other house, of whom he was one, and thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that he was lost in the crowd, had been invited over to luncheon.  There had been after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of the original motive, a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things, intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts, that made the place almost famous; and the great rooms were so numerous that guests could wander at their will, hang back from the principal group and in cases where they took such matters with the last seriousness give themselves up to mysterious appreciations and measurements.  There were persons to be observed, singly or in couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners with their hands on their knees and their heads nodding quite as with the emphasis of an excited sense of smell.  When they were two they either mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into silences of even deeper import, so that there were aspects of the occasion that gave it for Marcher much the air of the look round, previous to a sale highly advertised, that excites or quenches, as may be, the dream of acquisition.  The dream of acquisition at Weatherend would have had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the presence of those who knew too much and by that of those who knew nothing.  The great rooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him that he needed some straying apart to feel in a proper relation with them, though this impulse was not, as happened, like the gloating of some of his companions, to be compared to the movements of a dog sniffing a cupboard.  It had an issue promptly enough in a direction that was not to have been calculated.

It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not quite a remembrance, as they sat much separated at a very long table, had begun merely by troubling him rather pleasantly.  It affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning.  He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, as a continuation, but didnt know what it continued, which was an interest or an amusement the greater as he was also somehow awareyet without a direct sign from herthat the young woman herself hadnt lost the thread.  She hadnt lost it, but she wouldnt give it back to him, he saw, without some putting forth of his hand for it; and he not only saw that, but saw several things more, things odd enough in the light of the fact that at the moment some accident of grouping brought them face to face he was still merely fumbling with the idea that any contact between them in the past would have had no importance.  If it had had no importance he scarcely knew why his actual impression of her should so seem to have so much; the answer to which, however, was that in such a life as they all appeared to be leading for the moment one could but take things as they came.  He was satisfied, without in the least being able to say why, that this young lady might roughly have ranked in the house as a poor relation; satisfied also that she was not there on a brief visit, but was more or less a part of the establishmentalmost a working, a remunerated part.  Didnt she enjoy at periods a protection that she paid for by helping, among other services, to show the place and explain it, deal with the tiresome people, answer questions about the dates of the building, the styles of the furniture, the authorship of the pictures, the favourite haunts of the ghost?  It wasnt that she looked as if you could have given her shillingsit was impossible to look less so.  Yet when she finally drifted toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever so much olderolder than when he had seen her beforeit might have been as an effect of her guessing that he had, within the couple of hours, devoted more imagination to her than to all the others put together, and had thereby penetrated to a kind of truth that the others were too stupid for.  She was there on harder terms than any one; she was there as a consequence of things suffered, one way and another, in the interval of years; and she remembered him very much as she was rememberedonly a good deal better.

By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in one of the roomsremarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney-placeout of which their friends had passed, and the charm of it was that even before they had spoken they had practically arranged with each other to stay behind for talk.  The charm, happily, was in other things toopartly in there being scarce a spot at Weatherend without something to stay behind for.  It was in the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour.  It was most of all perhaps in the way she came to him as if, since she had been turned on to deal with the simpler sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole thing down, just take her mild attention for a part of her general business.  As soon as he heard her voice, however, the gap was filled up and the missing link supplied; the slight irony he divined in her attitude lost its advantage.  He almost jumped at it to get there before her.  I met you years and years ago in Rome.  I remember all about it.  She confessed to disappointmentshe had been so sure he didnt; and to prove how well he did he began to pour forth the particular recollections that popped up as he called for them.  Her face and her voice, all at his service now, worked the miraclethe impression operating like the torch of a lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas-jets.  Marcher flattered himself the illumination was brilliant, yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him, with amusement, that in his haste to make everything right he had got most things rather wrong.  It hadnt been at Romeit had been at Naples; and it hadnt been eight years beforeit had been more nearly ten.  She hadnt been, either, with her uncle and aunt, but with her mother and brother; in addition to which it was not with the Pembles he had been, but with the Boyers, coming down in their company from Romea point on which she insisted, a little to his confusion, and as to which she had her evidence in hand.  The Boyers she had known, but didnt know the Pembles, though she had heard of them, and it was the people he was with who had made them acquainted.  The incident of the thunderstorm that had raged round them with such violence as to drive them for refuge into an excavationthis incident had not occurred at the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occasion when they had been present there at an important find.

He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, though the moral of them was, she pointed out, that he really didnt remember the least thing about her; and he only felt it as a drawback that when all was made strictly historic there didnt appear much of anything left.  They lingered together still, she neglecting her officefor from the moment he was so clever she had no proper right to himand both neglecting the house, just waiting as to see if a memory or two more wouldnt again breathe on them.  It hadnt taken them many minutes, after all, to put down on the table, like the cards of a pack, those that constituted their respective hands; only what came out was that the pack was unfortunately not perfectthat the past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them, naturally, no more than it had.  It had made them anciently meether at twenty, him at twenty-five; but nothing was so strange, they seemed to say to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadnt done a little more for them.  They looked at each other as with the feeling of an occasion missed; the present would have been so much better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadnt been so stupidly meagre.  There werent, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in coming to pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities of freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too deeply buriedtoo deeply (didnt it seem?) to sprout after so many years.  Marcher could only feel he ought to have rendered her some servicesaved her from a capsized boat in the bay or at least recovered her dressing-bag, filched from her cab in the streets of Naples by a lazzarone with a stiletto.  Or it would have been nice if he could have been taken with fever all alone at his hotel, and she could have come to look after him, to write to his people, to drive him out in convalescence.  Then they would be in possession of the something or other that their actual show seemed to lack.  It yet somehow presented itself, this show, as too good to be spoiled; so that they were reduced for a few minutes more to wondering a little helplessly whysince they seemed to know a certain number of the same peopletheir reunion had been so long averted.  They didnt use that name for it, but their delay from minute to minute to join the others was a kind of confession that they didnt quite want it to be a failure.  Their attempted supposition of reasons for their not having met but showed how little they knew of each other.  There came in fact a moment when Marcher felt a positive pang.  It was vain to pretend she was an old friend, for all the communities were wanting, in spite of which it was as an old friend that he saw she would have suited him.  He had new ones enoughwas surrounded with them for instance on the stage of the other house; as a new one he probably wouldnt 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 imaginationas against timefor something that would do, and saying to himself that if it didnt come this sketch of a fresh start would show for quite awkwardly bungled.  They would separate, and now for no second or no third chance.  They would have tried and not succeeded.  Then it was, just at the turn, as he afterwards made it out to himself, that, everything else failing, she herself decided to take up the case and, as it were, save the situation.  He felt as soon as she spoke that she had been consciously keeping back what she said and hoping to get on without it; a scruple in her that immensely touched him when, by the end of three or four minutes more, he was able to measure it.  What she brought out, at any rate, quite cleared the air and supplied the linkthe link it was so odd he should frivolously have managed to lose.