He came back the next day, but she was then unable to see him, and as it
was literally the first time this had occurred in the long stretch of
their acquaintance he turned away, defeated and sore, almost angry--or
feeling at least that such a break in their custom was really the
beginning of the end--and wandered alone with his thoughts, especially
with the one he was least able to keep down. She was dying and he would
lose her; she was dying and his life would end. He stopped in the Park,
into which he had passed, and stared before him at his recurrent doubt.
Away from her the doubt pressed again; in her presence he had believed
her, but as he felt his forlornness he threw himself into the explanation
that, nearest at hand, had most of a miserable warmth for him and least
of a cold torment. She had deceived him to save him--to put him off with
something in which he should be able to rest. What could the thing that
was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had began to
happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude--that was what he
had figured as the Beast in the Jungle, that was what had been in the lap
of the gods. He had had her word for it as he left her--what else on
earth could she have meant? It wasn't a thing of a monstrous order; not
a fate rare and distinguished; not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed
and immortalised; it had only the stamp of the common doom. But poor
Marcher at this hour judged the common doom sufficient. It would serve
his turn, and even as the consummation of infinite waiting he would bend
his pride to accept it. He sat down on a bench in the twilight. He
hadn't been a fool. Something had _been_, as she had said, to come.
Before he rose indeed it had quite struck him that the final fact really
matched with the long avenue through which he had had to reach it. As
sharing his suspense and as giving herself all, giving her life, to bring
it to an end, she had come with him every step of the way. He had lived
by her aid, and to leave her behind would be cruelly, damnably to miss
her. What could be more overwhelming than that?
Well, he was to know within the week, for though she kept him a while at
bay, left him restless and wretched during a series of days on each of
which he asked about her only again to have to turn away, she ended his
trial by receiving him where she had always received him. Yet she had
been brought out at some hazard into the presence of so many of the
things that were, consciously, vainly, half their past, and there was
scant service left in the gentleness of her mere desire, all too visible,
to check his obsession and wind up his long trouble. That was clearly
what she wanted; the one thing more for her own peace while she could
still put out her hand. He was so affected by her state that, once
seated by her chair, he was moved to let everything go; it was she
herself therefore who brought him back, took up again, before she
dismissed him, her last word of the other time. She showed how she
wished to leave their business in order. "I'm not sure you understood.
You've nothing to wait for more. It _has_ come."
Oh how he looked at her! "Really?"
"Really."
"The thing that, as you said, _was_ to?"
"The thing that we began in our youth to watch for."
Face to face with her once more he believed her; it was a claim to which
he had so abjectly little to oppose. "You mean that it has come as a
positive definite occurrence, with a name and a date?"
"Positive. Definite. I don't know about the 'name,' but, oh with a
date!"
He found himself again too helplessly at sea. "But come in the
night--come and passed me by?"
May Bartram had her strange faint smile. "Oh no, it hasn't passed you
by!"
"But if I haven't been aware of it and it hasn't touched me--?"
"Ah your not being aware of it"--and she seemed to hesitate an instant to
deal with this--"your not being aware of it is the strangeness in the
strangeness. It's the wonder _of_ the wonder." She spoke as with the
softness almost of a sick child, yet now at last, at the end of all, with
the perfect straightness of a sibyl. She visibly knew that she knew, and
the effect on him was of something co-ordinate, in its high character,
with the law that had ruled him. It was the true voice of the law; so on
her lips would the law itself have sounded. "It _has_ touched you," she
went on. "It has done its office. It has made you all its own."
"So utterly without my knowing it?"
"So utterly without your knowing it." His hand, as he leaned to her, was
on the arm of her chair, and, dimly smiling always now, she placed her
own on it. "It's enough if _I_ know it."
"Oh!" he confusedly breathed, as she herself of late so often had done.
"What I long ago said is true. You'll never know now, and I think you
ought to be content. You've _had_ it," said May Bartram.
"But had what?"
"Why what was to have marked you out. The proof of your law. It has
acted. I'm too glad," she then bravely added, "to have been able to see
what it's _not_."
He continued to attach his eyes to her, and with the sense that it was
all beyond him, and that _she_ was too, he would still have sharply
challenged her hadn't he so felt it an abuse of her weakness to do more
than take devoutly what she gave him, take it hushed as to a revelation.
If he did speak, it was out of the foreknowledge of his loneliness to
come. "If you're glad of what it's 'not' it might then have been worse?"
She turned her eyes away, she looked straight before her; with which
after a moment: "Well, you know our fears."
He wondered. "It's something then we never feared?"
On this slowly she turned to him. "Did we ever dream, with all our
dreams, that we should sit and talk of it thus?"
He tried for a little to make out that they had; but it was as if their
dreams, numberless enough, were in solution in some thick cold mist
through which thought lost itself. "It might have been that we couldn't
talk."
"Well"--she did her best for him--"not from this side. This, you see,"
she said, "is the _other_ side."
"I think," poor Marcher returned, "that all sides are the same to me."
Then, however, as she gently shook her head in correction: "We mightn't,
as it were, have got across--?"
"To where we are--no. We're _here_"--she made her weak emphasis.
"And much good does it do us!" was her friend's frank comment.
"It does us the good it can. It does us the good that _it_ isn't here.
It's past. It's behind," said May Bartram. "Before--" but her voice
dropped.
He had got up, not to tire her, but it was hard to combat his yearning.
She after all told him nothing but that his light had failed--which he
knew well enough without her. "Before--?" he blankly echoed.
"Before you see, it was always to _come_. That kept it present."
"Oh I don't care what comes now! Besides," Marcher added, "it seems to
me I liked it better present, as you say, than I can like it absent with
_your_ absence."
"Oh mine!"--and her pale hands made light of it.
"With the absence of everything." He had a dreadful sense of standing
there before her for--so far as anything but this proved, this bottomless
drop was concerned--the last time of their life. It rested on him with a
weight he felt he could scarce bear, and this weight it apparently was
that still pressed out what remained in him of speakable protest. "I
believe you; but I can't begin to pretend I understand. _Nothing_, for
me, is past; nothing _will_ pass till I pass myself, which I pray my
stars may be as soon as possible. Say, however," he added, "that I've
eaten my cake, as you contend, to the last crumb--how can the thing I've
never felt at all be the thing I was marked out to feel?"
She met him perhaps less directly, but she met him unperturbed. "You
take your 'feelings' for granted. You were to suffer your fate. That
was not necessarily to know it."
"How in the world--when what is such knowledge but suffering?"
She looked up at him a while in silence. "No--you don't understand."
"I suffer," said John Marcher.
"Don't, don't!"
"How can I help at least _that_?"
"_Don't_!" May Bartram repeated.
She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, that he
stared an instant--stared as if some light, hitherto hidden, had
shimmered across his vision. Darkness again closed over it, but the
gleam had already become for him an idea. "Because I haven't the
right--?"
"Don't _know_--when you needn't," she mercifully urged. "You needn't--for
we shouldn't."
"Shouldn't?" If he could but know what she meant!
"No-- it's too much."
"Too much?" he still asked but with a mystification that was the next
moment of a sudden to give way. Her words, if they meant something,
affected him in this light--the light also of her wasted face--as meaning
_all_, and the sense of what knowledge had been for herself came over him
with a rush which broke through into a question. "Is it of that then
you're dying?"
She but watched him, gravely at first, as to see, with this, where he
was, and she might have seen something or feared something that moved her
sympathy. "I would live for you still--if I could." Her eyes closed for
a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying.
"But I can't!" she said as she raised them again to take leave of him.
She couldn't indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared, and he had
no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom. They
had parted for ever in that strange talk; access to her chamber of pain,
rigidly guarded, was almost wholly forbidden him; he was feeling now
moreover, in the face of doctors, nurses, the two or three relatives
attracted doubtless by the presumption of what she had to "leave," how
few were the rights, as they were called in such cases, that he had to
put forward, and how odd it might even seem that their intimacy shouldn't
have given him more of them. The stupidest fourth cousin had more, even
though she had been nothing in such a person's life. She had been a
feature of features in _his_, for what else was it to have been so
indispensable? Strange beyond saying were the ways of existence,
baffling for him the anomaly of his lack, as he felt it to be, of
producible claim. A woman might have been, as it were, everything to
him, and it might yet present him, in no connexion that any one seemed
held to recognise. If this was the case in these closing weeks it was
the case more sharply on the occasion of the last offices rendered, in
the great grey London cemetery, to what had been mortal, to what had been
precious, in his friend. The concourse at her grave was not numerous,
but he saw himself treated as scarce more nearly concerned with it than
if there had been a thousand others. He was in short from this moment
face to face with the fact that he was to profit extraordinarily little
by the interest May Bartram had taken in him. He couldn't quite have
said what he expected, but he hadn't surely expected this approach to a
double privation. Not only had her interest failed him, but he seemed to
feel himself unattended--and for a reason he couldn't seize--by the
distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if nothing else, of the man
markedly bereaved. It was as if, in the view of society he had not
_been_ markedly bereaved, as if there still failed some sign or proof of
it, and as if none the less his character could never be affirmed nor the
deficiency ever made up. There were moments as the weeks went by when he
would have liked, by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the
intimacy of his loss, in order that it _might_ be questioned and his
retort, to the relief of his spirit, so recorded; but the moments of an
irritation more helpless followed fast on these, the moments during
which, turning things over with a good conscience but with a bare
horizon, he found himself wondering if he oughtn't to have begun, so to
speak, further back.
He found himself wondering indeed at many things, and this last
speculation had others to keep it company. What could he have done,
after all, in her lifetime, without giving them both, as it were, away?
He couldn't have made known she was watching him, for that would have
published the superstition of the Beast. This was what closed his mouth
now--now that the Jungle had been thrashed to vacancy and that the Beast
had stolen away. It sounded too foolish and too flat; the difference for
him in this particular, the extinction in his life of the element of
suspense, was such as in fact to surprise him. He could scarce have said
what the effect resembled; the abrupt cessation, the positive
prohibition, of music perhaps, more than anything else, in some place all
adjusted and all accustomed to sonority and to attention. If he could at
any rate have conceived lifting the veil from his image at some moment of
the past (what had he done, after all, if not lift it to _her_?) so to do
this to-day, to talk to people at large of the Jungle cleared and confide
to them that he now felt it as safe, would have been not only to see them
listen as to a goodwife's tale, but really to hear himself tell one. What
it presently came to in truth was that poor Marcher waded through his
beaten grass, where no life stirred, where no breath sounded, where no
evil eye seemed to gleam from a possible lair, very much as if vaguely
looking for the Beast, and still more as if acutely missing it. He
walked about in an existence that had grown strangely more spacious, and,
stopping fitfully in places where the undergrowth of life struck him as
closer, asked himself yearningly, wondered secretly and sorely, if it
would have lurked here or there. It would have at all events sprung;
what was at least complete was his belief in the truth itself of the
assurance given him. The change from his old sense to his new was
absolute and final: what was to happen had so absolutely and finally
happened that he was as little able to know a fear for his future as to
know a hope; so absent in short was any question of anything still to
come. He was to live entirely with the other question, that of his
unidentified past, that of his having to see his fortune impenetrably
muffled and masked.
The torment of this vision became then his occupation; he couldn't
perhaps have consented to live but for the possibility of guessing. She
had told him, his friend, not to guess; she had forbidden him, so far as
he might, to know, and she had even in a sort denied the power in him to
learn: which were so many things, precisely, to deprive him of rest. It
wasn't that he wanted, he argued for fairness, that anything past and
done should repeat itself; it was only that he shouldn't, as an
anticlimax, have been taken sleeping so sound as not to be able to win
back by an effort of thought the lost stuff of consciousness. He
declared to himself at moments that he would either win it back or have
done with consciousness for ever; he made this idea his one motive in
fine, made it so much his passion that none other, to compare with it,
seemed ever to have touched him. The lost stuff of consciousness became
thus for him as a strayed or stolen child to an unappeasable father; he
hunted it up and down very much as if he were knocking at doors and
enquiring of the police. This was the spirit in which, inevitably, he
set himself to travel; he started on a journey that was to be as long as
he could make it; it danced before him that, as the other side of the
globe couldn't possibly have less to say to him, it might, by a
possibility of suggestion, have more. Before he quitted London, however,
he made a pilgrimage to May Bartram's grave, took his way to it through
the endless avenues of the grim suburban necropolis, sought it out in the
wilderness of tombs, and, though he had come but for the renewal of the
act of farewell, found himself, when he had at last stood by it, beguiled
into long intensities. He stood for an hour, powerless to turn away and
yet powerless to penetrate the darkness of death; fixing with his eyes
her inscribed name and date, beating his forehead against the fact of the
secret they kept, drawing his breath, while he waited, as if some sense
would in pity of him rise from the stones. He kneeled on the stones,
however, in vain; they kept what they concealed; and if the face of the
tomb did become a face for him it was because her two names became a pair
of eyes that didn't know him. He gave them a last long look, but no
palest light broke.