The Beast in the Jungle | Page 7

Henry James
the other.
He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most
disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated burden, his
perpetual suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving
others no glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his life, asking of them no
allowance and only making on his side all those that were asked. He
hadn't disturbed people with the queerness of their having to know a
haunted man, though he had had moments of rather special temptation
on hearing them say they were forsooth "unsettled." If they were as
unsettled as he was--he who had never been settled for an hour in his
life--they would know what it meant. Yet it wasn't, all the same, for
him to make them, and he listened to them civilly enough. This was
why he had such good--though possibly such rather
colourless--manners; this was why, above all, he could regard himself,
in a greedy world, as decently--as in fact perhaps even a little
sublimely--unselfish. Our point is accordingly that he valued this
character quite sufficiently to measure his present danger of letting it

lapse, against which he promised himself to be much on his guard. He
was quite ready, none the less, to be selfish just a little, since surely no
more charming occasion for it had come to him. "Just a little," in a
word, was just as much as Miss Bartram, taking one day with another,
would let him. He never would be in the least coercive, and would keep
well before him the lines on which consideration for her--the very
highest--ought to proceed. He would thoroughly establish the heads
under which her affairs, her requirements, her peculiarities--he went so
far as to give them the latitude of that name--would come into their
intercourse. All this naturally was a sign of how much he took the
intercourse itself for granted. There was nothing more to be done about
that. It simply existed; had sprung into being with her first penetrating
question to him in the autumn light there at Weatherend. The real form
it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of
their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put
marrying out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his
obsession, in short, wasn't a privilege he could invite a woman to share;
and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him.
Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of
the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It
signified little whether the crouching Beast were destined to slay him
or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the
creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling
didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such
was the image under which he had ended by figuring his life.
They had at first, none the less, in the scattered hours spent together,
made no allusion to that view of it; which was a sign he was
handsomely alert to give that he didn't expect, that he in fact didn't care,
always to be talking about it. Such a feature in one's outlook was really
like a hump on one's back. The difference it made every minute of the
day existed quite independently of discussion. One discussed of course
like a hunchback, for there was always, if nothing else, the hunchback
face. That remained, and she was watching him; but people watched
best, as a general thing, in silence, so that such would be predominantly
the manner of their vigil. Yet he didn't want, at the same time, to be
tense and solemn; tense and solemn was what he imagined he too much

showed for with other people. The thing to be, with the one person who
knew, was easy and natural--to make the reference rather than be
seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather than be seeming to make it, and to
keep it, in any case, familiar, facetious even, rather than pedantic and
portentous. Some such consideration as the latter was doubtless in his
mind for instance when he wrote pleasantly to Miss Bartram that
perhaps the great thing he had so long felt as in the lap of the gods was
no more than this circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her
acquiring a house in London. It was the first allusion they had yet again
made, needing any other hitherto so little; but when she replied, after
having given him the news, that she was by no means satisfied with
such a trifle as the climax to so special a suspense,
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