The Beast in the Jungle
by Henry James

CHAPTER I

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."