The Portable Henry James (43 page)

“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 spoken. I’ve never, never repeated of you what you told me.” She looked at him so that he perfectly believed her. Their eyes met over it in such a way that he was without a doubt. “And I never will.”

She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost excessive, put him at ease about her possible derision. Somehow the whole question was a new luxury to him—that is, from the moment she was in possession. If she didn’t take the ironic view she clearly took the sympathetic, and that was what he 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 her and yet could profit perhaps exquisitely by the accident of having done so of old. “Please don’t then. We’re just right as it is.”

“Oh, I am,” she laughed, “if you are!” To which she added: “Then you do still feel in the same way?”

It was impossible to him not to take to himself that she was really 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. To 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 at him. 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—?”

“Of 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.

She thought a moment. “It was perhaps because I seemed, as you spoke, to understand it.”

“You do understand it?” he eagerly asked.

Again 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 come.”

He shook his head in complete surrender now. “It hasn’t yet 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, if I were.”

“It’s to be something you’re merely to suffer?”

“Well, say to wait for—to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves.”

She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery. “Isn’t what you describe perhaps but the expectation—or, at any rate, the sense of danger, familiar to so many people—of falling in love?”

John Marcher thought. “Did you ask me that before?”

“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. Of 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, “that I think that if it had been that, I should by this time know.”

“Do you mean because you’ve
been
in love?” And then as 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 affair?”

“Here I am, you see. It hasn’t been overwhelming.”

“Then it hasn’t been love,” said May Bartram.

“Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that—I’ve taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable,” he explained. “But it wasn’t strange. It wasn’t what
my
affair’s to be.”

“You want something all to yourself—something that nobody 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 further imposed itself. If she had not been interested before she would have been interested now. “Is it a sense of coming violence?”

Evidently now too, again, he liked to talk of it. “I don’t think of it as—when it does come—necessarily violent. I only think of it as natural and as of course, above all, unmistakeable. I think of it simply as
the
thing.
The
thing will of itself appear natural.”

“Then how will it appear strange?”

Marcher bethought himself. “It won’t—to
me.
”

“To whom then?”

“Well,” he replied, smiling at last, “say to you.”

“Oh then, I’m to be present?”

“Why, you
are
present—since you know.”

“I see.” She turned it over. “But I mean at the catastrophe.”

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.”

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

“Don’t leave me
now,
” he went on.

“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?”

“No,” said May Bartram. “I understand you. I believe you.”

“You mean you feel how my obsession—poor old thing!—may correspond to some possible reality?”

“To some possible reality.”

“Then you
will
watch with me?”

She hesitated, then for the third time put her question. “Are you afraid?”

“Did I tell you I was—at Naples?”

“No, you said nothing about it.”

“Then I don’t know. And I should
like
to 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.

The fact that she “knew”—knew and yet neither chaffed him nor betrayed him—had in a short time begun to constitute between them a sensible bond, which became more marked when, within the year that followed their afternoon at Weatherend, the opportunities for meeting multiplied. The event that thus promoted these occasions was the death of the ancient lady, her great-aunt, under whose wing, since losing her mother, she had to such an extent found shelter, and who, though but the widowed mother of the new successor to the property, had succeeded—thanks to a high tone and a high temper—in not forfeiting the supreme position at the great house. The deposition of this personage arrived but with her death, which, followed by many changes, made in particular a difference for the young woman in whom Marcher’s expert attention had recognised from the first a dependent with a pride that might ache though it didn’t bristle. Nothing for a long time had made him easier than the thought that the aching must have been much soothed by Miss Bartram’s now finding herself able to set up a small home in London. She had acquired property, to an amount that made that luxury just possible, under her aunt’s extremely complicated will, and when the whole matter began to be straightened out, which indeed took time, she let him know that the happy issue was at last in view. He had seen her again before that day, both because she had more than once accompanied the ancient lady to town and because he had paid another visit to the friends who so conveniently made of Weatherend one of the charms of their own hospitality. These friends had taken him back there; he had achieved there again with Miss Bartram some quiet detachment; and he had in London succeeded in persuading her to more than one brief absence from her aunt. They went together, on these latter occasions, to the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked of Italy at large—not now attempting to recover, as at first, the taste of their youth and their ignorance. That recovery, the first day at Weatherend, had served its purpose well, had given them quite enough; so that they were, to Marcher’s sense, no longer hovering about the head-waters of their stream, but had felt their boat pushed sharply off and down the current.

They were literally afloat together; for our gentleman this was marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was just the buried treasure of her knowledge. He had with his own hands dug up this little hoard, brought to light—that is to within reach of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privacies—the object of value the hiding-place of which he had, after putting it into the ground himself, so strangely, so long forgotten. The exquisite luck of having again just stumbled on the spot made him indifferent to any other question; he would doubtless have devoted more time to the odd accident of his lapse of memory if he had not been moved to devote so much to the sweetness, the comfort, as he felt, for the future, that this accident itself had helped to keep fresh. It had never entered into his plan that anyone should “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 mouth in youth, in spite of him, he would count that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost. That the right person
should
know tempered the asperity of his secret more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine; and May Bartram was clearly right, because—well, because there she was. Her knowledge simply settled it; he would have been sure enough by this time had she been wrong. There was that in his situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as a mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact—the fact only—of her interest in his predicament, from her mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the funniest of the funny. Aware, in fine, that her price for him was just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably spared, he was careful to remember that she had, after all, also a life of her own, with things that might happen to
her,
things that in friendship one should likewise take account of. Something fairly remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, in this connection—something represented by a certain passage of his consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the other.

He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated burden, his perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his life, asking of them no allowance and only making on his side all those that were asked. He had disturbed nobody 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 unsettled as he was—he who had never been settled for an hour in his life—they would know what it meant. Yet it wasn’t, all the same, for him to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough. This was why he had such good—though possibly such rather colourless—manners; this was why, above all, he could regard himself, in a greedy world, as decently—as, in fact, perhaps even a little sublimely—unselfish. Our point is accordingly that he valued this character quite sufficiently to measure his present danger of letting it lapse, against which he promised himself to be much on his guard. He was quite ready, none the less, to be selfish just a little, since, surely, no more charming occasion for it had come to him. “Just a little,” in a word, was just as much as Miss Bartram, taking one day with another, would let him. He never would be in the least coercive, and he would keep well before him the lines on which consideration for her—the very highest—ought to proceed. He would thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities—he went so far as to give them the latitude of that name—would come into their intercourse. All this naturally was a sign of how much he took the intercourse itself for granted. There was nothing more to be done about
that.
It simply existed; had sprung into being with her first penetrating question to him in the autumn light there at Weatherend. The real form it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, was not a condition he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little whether the crouching beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the image under which he had ended by figuring his life.