The Beast in the Jungle
by Henry James
Part I
What determined the speech that startled him in the
course of their encounter scarcely matters, being
probably but some words spoken by himself quite
without intention--spoken as they lingered and slowly
moved together after their renewal of acquaintance. He
had been conveyed by friends an hour or two before to
the house at which she was staying; the party of visitors
at the other house, of whom he was one, and thanks to
whom it was his theory, as always that he was lost in the
crowd, had been invited over to luncheon. There had
been after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of
the original motive, a view of Weatherend itself and the
fine things, intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms,
treasurers 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 him briefly, in the course of the October afternoon,
to his cloer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a
reminder, yet not quite a remembrance, as they sat much
separated at a very long table, had begun merely by
troubling him rather pleasantly. it affected him as the
sequel of something of which he had lost the beginning.
He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, as a
continuation, but didn't know what it continued, which
was an interest or an amusement the greater as he was
also somehow aware--yet without a direct sign from
her--that the young woman herself hadn't lost the thread.
She hadn't lost it, but she wouldn't give it back to him, he
saw, without some putting forth of his hand for it; and he
not only saw that, but saw several things more, things
odd enough in the light of the fact that at the moment
some accident of grouping brought them face to face he
was still merely fumbling with the idea that any contact
between them in the past would have had no importance.
If it had no importance he scarcely knew why his actual
impression of her should so seem to have to much; the
answer to which, however, was that in such a life as they
all appeared to be leading for the moment one could but
take things as they came. he was satisfied, without in the
least being able to say why, that this young lady might
roughly have ranked in the house as a poor relation;
satisfied also that she was not there on a brief visit, but
was more or less a part of the establishment--almost a
working, a remunerated part. Didn't she enjoy at periods
a protection that she paid for by helping, among other
services, to show the place and explain it, deal with the
tiresome people, answer questions about the dates of the
building, the styles of the furniture, the authorship of the
pictures, the favourite haunts of the ghost? It wasn't that
she looked as if you could have given her shillings--it was
impossible to look less so. yet when she finally drifted
toward him, distinctly handsome, though ever so much
older--older than when he had seen her before--it might
have been as an effect of her guessing that he had, within
the couple of hors, devoted more imagination to her than
to all the others put together, and had thereby penetrated
to a kind of truth that the others were too stupid for. She
was there on harder terms than any one; she was there as
a consequence of things suffered, one way and another,
in the interval of years; and she remembered him very
much as she was remembered--only a good deal better.
By the time that they at last thus came to speech they
were alone in one of the rooms--remarkable for a fine
portrait over the chimney-place--out of which their
friends had passed, and the charm of it was that even
before they had spoken they had practically arranged
with each other to stay behind for talk. The charm,
happily, was in other things too--partly in there being
scarce a spot at Weatherend without something to stay
behind for. It was in the way the autumn day looked in to
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 be 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 men you
years and years ago in Rome. I remember all about it."
She confessed to disappointment--she had been so sure
he didn't; and to prove how well he did he began to pour
forth the particular recollections that popped up as he
called for them. Her face and her voice, all at his service
now, worked the miracle--the impression operating like
the torch of a lamplighter who tourches 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 go most things
rather wrong. it hadn't been at Rome--it had been at
Naples; and it hadn't been eight years before--it had
been more nearly ten. She hadn't been, either, with her
uncle and aunt, but with her mother and her brother; in
addition to which it was not with the Pembles he had
been, but with the Boyers, coming down in their
company from Rome--a point on which she insisted, a
little to his confusion, and as to which she had her
evidence in hand. The Boyers she had known, but didn't
know the Pembles, though she had heard of them, and it
was the people he was with who had made them
acquainted. The incident of the thunderstorm that had
raged round them with such violence as to drive them for
refuge into an excavation--this incident had not occurred
at the Palace of the Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an
occasion when they had been present there at an
important find.
He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her
corrections, thought he moral of them was, she pointed
out, that he really didn't remember the least thing about
her; and he only felt it as a drawback that when all was
made strictly historic there didn't appear much of anything
left. They lingered together still, she neglecting her
office--for from the moment he was so clever she had no
proper right to him--and both neglecting the house, just
waiting as to see if a memory or two more wouldn't again
breathe on them. it hadn't taken them many minutes, after
all, to put down on the table, like the cards of a pack,
those that constituted their respective hands; only what
came out was that the pack was unfortunately not
perfect--that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged,
...
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