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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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
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 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, 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 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, could give
them, naturally, no more than it had. It had made them anciently
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 missed; the present would have been so much better if the
other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn't been so stupidly
meagre. There weren't, 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 buried--too deeply
(didn't it seem?) to sprout after so many years. Marcher could only feel
he ought to have rendered her some service--saved 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
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
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 enough--was
surrounded with them for instance on the stage of 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 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 link--the link it was so odd he should frivolously have
managed to lose.
"You know you told me something 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, 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 was even more surprised than ashamed. But the
great thing was that he saw in this 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 mention. "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 _I_ 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 all the more bear to know. Besides, perhaps I haven't."
"Perhaps. Yet if you haven't," she added, "I should suppose you'd
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--?" But he faltered, lest what came to him
shouldn't be right, lest he should only give himself away.
"It was something about yourself that it was natural one shouldn't
forget--that is if one remembered you at all. That's why I ask you," she
smiled, "if the thing you then spoke of has ever come to pass?"
Oh then he saw, but he was lost in wonder and found himself embarrassed.
This, he also saw, made her sorry for him, as if her allusion had been a
mistake. It took him but a moment, however, to feel it hadn't been, much
as it had been a surprise. After the first little shock of it her
knowledge on the contrary began, even if rather strangely, to taste sweet
to him. She was the only other person in the world then who would have
it, and she had had it all these years, while the fact of his having so
breathed his secret had unaccountably faded from him. No wonder they
couldn't have met as if nothing had happened. "I judge," he finally
said, "that I know what you mean. Only I had strangely enough lost any
sense 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 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 sarcastic 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 he shouldn't take to himself that she was really
interested, though it all kept coming as a perfect surprise. 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's 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 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 he could see it further
impose itself. If she hadn't been interested before she'd 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 for the full wind-up of
their understanding. "I'll watch with you," said May Bartram.