Transcribed from the 1916 Martin Secker edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
THE ALTAR OF
THE DEAD
BY HENRY JAMES
[Picture: Graphic]
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LONDON: MARTIN SECKER
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI
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This edition first published 1916
The text follows that of the
Definitive Edition
CHAPTER I.
He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved
them still less when they made a pretence of a figure. Celebrations and
suppressions were equally painful to him, and but one of the former found
a place in his life. He had kept each year in his own fashion the date
of Mary Antrim’s death. It would be more to the point perhaps to say
that this occasion kept _him_: it kept him at least effectually from
doing anything else. It took hold of him again and again with a hand of
which time had softened but never loosened the touch. He waked to his
feast of memory as consciously as he would have waked to his
marriage-morn. Marriage had had of old but too little to say to the
matter: for the girl who was to have been his bride there had been no
bridal embrace. She had died of a malignant fever after the wedding-day
had been fixed, and he had lost before fairly tasting it an affection
that promised to fill his life to the brim.
Of that benediction, however, it would have been false to say this life
could really be emptied: it was still ruled by a pale ghost, still
ordered by a sovereign presence. He had not been a man of numerous
passions, and even in all these years no sense had grown stronger with
him than the sense of being bereft. He had needed no priest and no altar
to make him for ever widowed. He had done many things in the world—he
had done almost all but one: he had never, never forgotten. He had tried
to put into his existence whatever else might take up room in it, but had
failed to make it more than a house of which the mistress was eternally
absent. She was most absent of all on the recurrent December day that
his tenacity set apart. He had no arranged observance of it, but his
nerves made it all their own. They drove him forth without mercy, and
the goal of his pilgrimage was far. She had been buried in a London
suburb, a part then of Nature’s breast, but which he had seen lose one
after another every feature of freshness. It was in truth during the
moments he stood there that his eyes beheld the place least. They looked
at another image, they opened to another light. Was it a credible
future? Was it an incredible past? Whatever the answer it was an
immense escape from the actual.
It’s true that if there weren’t other dates than this there were other
memories; and by the time George Stransom was fifty-five such memories
had greatly multiplied. There were other ghosts in his life than the
ghost of Mary Antrim. He had perhaps not had more losses than most men,
but he had counted his losses more; he hadn’t seen death more closely,
but had in a manner felt it more deeply. He had formed little by little
the habit of numbering his Dead: it had come to him early in life that
there was something one had to do for them. They were there in their
simplified intensified essence, their conscious absence and expressive
patience, as personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb.
When all sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if
their purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so little that
they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of the
hard usage of life. They had no organised service, no reserved place, no
honour, no shelter, no safety. Even ungenerous people provided for the
living, but even those who were called most generous did nothing for the
others. So on George Stransom’s part had grown up with the years a
resolve that he at least would do something, do it, that is, for his
own—would perform the great charity without reproach. Every man _had_
his own, and every man had, to meet this charity, the ample resources of
the soul.
It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke for them best; as
the years at any rate went by he found himself in regular communion with
these postponed pensioners, those whom indeed he always called in his
thoughts the Others. He spared them the moments, he organised the
charity. Quite how it had risen he probably never could have told you,
but what came to pass was that an altar, such as was after all within
everybody’s compass, lighted with perpetual candles and dedicated to
these secret rites, reared itself in his spiritual spaces. He had
wondered of old, in some embarrassment, whether he had a religion; being
very sure, and not a little content, that he hadn’t at all events the
religion some of the people he had known wanted him to have. Gradually
this question was straightened out for him: it became clear to him that
the religion instilled by his earliest consciousness had been simply the
religion of the Dead. It suited his inclination, it satisfied his
spirit, it gave employment to his piety. It answered his love of great
offices, of a solemn and splendid ritual; for no shrine could be more
bedecked and no ceremonial more stately than those to which his worship
was attached. He had no imagination about these things but that they
were accessible to any one who should feel the need of them. The poorest
could build such temples of the spirit—could make them blaze with candles
and smoke with incense, make them flush with pictures and flowers. The
cost, in the common phrase, of keeping them up fell wholly on the
generous heart.