The Beast in the Jungle | Page 3

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