The Beast in the Jungle | Page 5

had
had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense
of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and
terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your
bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps
overwhelm you."
"Do you call that very simple?" John Marcher asked.
She thought a moment. "It was perhaps because I seemed, as you spoke,
to understand it."
"You do understand it?" he eagerly asked.
Again she kept her kind eyes on him. "You still have the belief?"
"Oh!" he exclaimed helplessly. There was too much to say.
"Whatever it's to be," she clearly made out, "it hasn't yet come."
He shook his head in complete surrender now. "It hasn't yet come. Only,
you know, it isn't anything I'm to do, to achieve in the world, to be
distinguished or admired for. I'm not such an ass as that. It would be
much better, no doubt, if I were."

"It's to be something you're merely to suffer?"
"Well, say to wait for--to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break
out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly
annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything,
striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences,
however they shape themselves."
She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be
that of mockery. "Isn't what you describe perhaps but the
expectation--or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many
people--of falling in love?"
John Marcher thought. "Did you ask me that before?"
"No--I wasn't so free-and-easy then. But it's what strikes me now."
"Of course," he said after a moment, "it strikes you. Of course it strikes
me. Of course what's in store for me may be no more than that. The
only thing is," he went on, "that I think if it had been that I should by
this time know."
"Do you mean because you've been in love?" And then as he but looked
at her in silence: "You've been in love, and it hasn't meant such a
cataclysm, hasn't proved the great affair?"
"Here I am, you see. It hasn't been overwhelming."
"Then it hasn't been love," said May Bartram.
"Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that--I've taken it till now. It
was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable," he explained. "But it
wasn't strange. It wasn't what my affair's to be."
"You want something all to yourself--something that nobody else
knows or has known?"
"It isn't a question of what I 'want'--God knows I don't want anything.
It's only a question of the apprehension that haunts me--that I live with

day by day."
He said this so lucidly and consistently that he could see it further
impose itself. If she hadn't been interested before she'd have been
interested now.
"Is it a sense of coming violence?"
Evidently now too again he liked to talk of it. "I don't think of it
as--when it does come--necessarily violent. I only think of it as natural
and as of course above all unmistakeable. I think of it simply as the
thing. The thing will of itself appear natural."
"Then how will it appear strange?"
Marcher bethought himself. "It won't--to me."
"To whom then?"
"Well," he replied, smiling at last, "say to you."
"Oh then I'm to be present?"
"Why you are present--since you know."
"I see." She turned it over. "But I mean at the catastrophe."
At this, for a minute, their lightness gave way to their gravity; it was as
if the long look they exchanged held them together. "It will only
depend on yourself--if you'll watch with me."
"Are you afraid?" she asked.
"Don't leave me now," he went on.
"Are you afraid?" she repeated.
"Do you think me simply out of my mind?" he pursued instead of
answering. "Do I merely strike you as a harmless lunatic?"

"No," said May Bartram. "I understand you. I believe you."
"You mean you feel how my obsession--poor old thing--may
correspond to some possible reality?"
"To some possible reality."
"Then you will watch with me?"
She hesitated, then for the third time put her question. "Are you
afraid?"
"Did I tell you I was--at Naples?"
"No, you said nothing about it."
"Then I don't know. And I should like to know," said John Marcher.
"You'll tell me yourself whether you think so. If you'll watch with me
you'll see."
"Very good then." They had been moving by this time across the room,
and at the door, before passing out, they paused as for the full wind-up
of their understanding. "I'll watch with you," said May Bartram.
CHAPTER II
The