It was all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date; which
came out in the fact that again and again, even after long intervals,
other things that passed between them were in relation to this hour but
the character of recalls and results. Its immediate effect had been
indeed rather to lighten insistence--almost to provoke a reaction; as if
their topic had dropped by its own weight and as if moreover, for that
matter, Marcher had been visited by one of his occasional warnings
against egotism. He had kept up, he felt, and very decently on the
whole, his consciousness of the importance of not being selfish, and it
was true that he had never sinned in that direction without promptly
enough trying to press the scales the other way. He often repaired his
fault, the season permitting, by inviting his friend to accompany him to
the opera; and it not infrequently thus happened that, to show he didn't
wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind, he was the cause of
her appearing there with him a dozen nights in the month. It even
happened that, seeing her home at such times, he occasionally went in
with her to finish, as he called it, the evening, and, the better to make
his point, sat down to the frugal but always careful little supper that
awaited his pleasure. His point was made, he thought, by his not
eternally insisting with her on himself; made for instance, at such
hours, when it befell that, her piano at hand and each of them familiar
with it, they went over passages of the opera together. It chanced to be
on one of these occasions, however, that he reminded her of her not
having answered a certain question he had put to her during the talk that
had taken place between them on her last birthday. "What is it that
saves _you_?"--saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation
from the usual human type. If he had practically escaped remark, as she
pretended, by doing, in the most important particular, what most men
do--find the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a sort with a
woman no better than himself--how had she escaped it, and how could the
alliance, such as it was, since they must suppose it had been more or
less noticed, have failed to make her rather positively talked about?
"I never said," May Bartram replied, "that it hadn't made me a good deal
talked about."
"Ah well then you're not 'saved.'"
"It hasn't been a question for me. If you've had your woman I've had,"
she said, "my man."
"And you mean that makes you all right?"
Oh it was always as if there were so much to say!
"I don't know why it shouldn't make me--humanly, which is what we're
speaking of--as right as it makes you."
"I see," Marcher returned. "'Humanly,' no doubt, as showing that you're
living for something. Not, that is, just for me and my secret."
May Bartram smiled. "I don't pretend it exactly shows that I'm not
living for you. It's my intimacy with you that's in question."
He laughed as he saw what she meant. "Yes, but since, as you say, I'm
only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're--aren't you? no more
than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like another. So if
I _am_, as I understand you, you're not compromised. Is that it?"
She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough. "That's it.
It's all that concerns me--to help you to pass for a man like another."
He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely. "How kind, how
beautiful, you are to me! How shall I ever repay you?"
She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of ways. But
she chose. "By going on as you are."
It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and really for so
long a time that the day inevitably came for a further sounding of their
depths. These depths, constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough
in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the
somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their
nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A
difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had
all the while not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an
idea within her that she didn't dare to express--a charge uttered just
before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. It had come
up for him then that she "knew" something and that what she knew was
bad--too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad
that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left the matter
too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's special sensibility,
almost too formidable again to touch. He circled about it at a distance
that alternately narrowed and widened and that still wasn't much affected
by the consciousness in him that there was nothing she could "know,"
after all, any better than he did. She had no source of knowledge he
hadn't equally--except of course that she might have finer nerves. That
was what women had where they were interested; they made out things,
where people were concerned, that the people often couldn't have made out
for themselves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were
conductors and revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram was in particular
that she had given herself so to his case. He felt in these days what,
oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of losing
her by some catastrophe--some catastrophe that yet wouldn't at all be the
catastrophe: partly because she had almost of a sudden begun to strike
him as more useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an
appearance of uncertainty in her health, co-incident and equally new. It
was characteristic of the inner detachment he had hitherto so
successfully cultivated and to which our whole account of him is a
reference, it was characteristic that his complications, such as they
were, had never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken about him,
even to the point of making him ask himself if he were, by any chance, of
a truth, within sight or sound, within touch or reach, within the
immediate jurisdiction, of the thing that waited.
When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed to him
her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the shadow of a
change and the chill of a shock. He immediately began to imagine
aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of her peril as the
direct menace for himself of personal privation. This indeed gave him
one of those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable to
him--it showed him that what was still first in his mind was the loss she
herself might suffer. "What if she should have to die before knowing,
before seeing--?" It would have been brutal, in the early stages of her
trouble, to put that question to her; but it had immediately sounded for
him to his own concern, and the possibility was what most made him sorry
for her. If she did "know," moreover, in the sense of her having had
some--what should he think?--mystical irresistible light, this would make
the matter not better, but worse, inasmuch as her original adoption of
his own curiosity had quite become the basis of her life. She had been
living to see what would _be_ to be seen, and it would quite lacerate her
to have to give up before the accomplishment of the vision. These
reflexions, as I say, quickened his generosity; yet, make them as he
might, he saw himself, with the lapse of the period, more and more
disconcerted. It lapsed for him with a strange steady sweep, and the
oddest oddity was that it gave him, independently of the threat of much
inconvenience, almost the only positive surprise his career, if career it
could be called, had yet offered him. She kept the house as she had
never done; he had to go to her to see her--she could meet him nowhere
now, though there was scarce a corner of their loved old London in which
she hadn't in the past, at one time or another, done so; and he found her
always seated by her fire in the deep old-fashioned chair she was less
and less able to leave. He had been struck one day, after an absence
exceeding his usual measure, with her suddenly looking much older to him
than he had ever thought of her being; then he recognised that the
suddenness was all on his side--he had just simply and suddenly noticed.
She looked older because inevitably, after so many years, she _was_ old,
or almost; which was of course true in still greater measure of her
companion. If she was old, or almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and
yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth
home to him. His surprises began here; when once they had begun they
multiplied; they came rather with a rush: it was as if, in the oddest way
in the world, they had all been kept back, sown in a thick cluster, for
the late afternoon of life, the time at which for people in general the
unexpected has died out.
One of them was that he should have caught himself--for he _had_ so
done--_really_ wondering if the great accident would take form now as
nothing more than his being condemned to see this charming woman, this
admirable friend, pass away from him. He had never so unreservedly
qualified her as while confronted in thought with such a possibility; in
spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his
long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his
situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would represent, as
connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of
which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures. He
had been far from holding it a failure--long as he had waited for the
appearance that was to make it a success. He had waited for quite
another thing, not for such a thing as that. The breath of his good
faith came short, however, as he recognised how long he had waited, or
how long at least his companion had. That she, at all events, might be
recorded as having waited in vain--this affected him sharply, and all the
more because of his at first having done little more than amuse himself
with the idea. It grew more grave as the gravity of her condition grew,
and the state of mind it produced in him, which he himself ended by
watching as if it had been some definite disfigurement of his outer
person, may pass for another of his surprises. This conjoined itself
still with another, the really stupefying consciousness of a question
that he would have allowed to shape itself had he dared. What did
everything mean--what, that is, did _she_ mean, she and her vain waiting
and her probable death and the soundless admonition of it all--unless
that, at this time of day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too late?
He had never at any stage of his queer consciousness admitted the whisper
of such a correction; he had never till within these last few months been
so false to his conviction as not to hold that what was to come to him
had time, whether _he_ struck himself as having it or not. That at last,
at last, he certainly hadn't it, to speak of, or had it but in the
scantiest measure--such, soon enough, as things went with him, became the
inference with which his old obsession had to reckon: and this it was not
helped to do by the more and more confirmed appearance that the great
vagueness casting the long shadow in which he had lived had, to attest
itself, almost no margin left. Since it was in Time that he was to have
met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as
he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the
sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak,
he waked up to another matter beside. It all hung together; they were
subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law.
When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the
secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated,
that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn't have been failure to be
bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be
anything. And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its
unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as he groped. He didn't
care what awful crash might overtake him, with what ignominy or what
monstrosity he might yet be associated--since he wasn't after all too
utterly old to suffer--if it would only be decently proportionate to the
posture he had kept, all his life, in the threatened presence of it. He
had but one desire left--that he shouldn't have been "sold."