The Beast in the Jungle | Page 8

she almost set him
wondering if she hadn't even a larger conception of singularity for him
than he had for himself. He was at all events destined to become aware
little by little, as time went by, that she was all the while looking at his
life, judging it, measuring it, in the light of the thing she knew, which
grew to be at last, with the consecration of the years, never mentioned
between them save as "the real truth" about him. That had always been
his own form of reference to it, but she adopted the form so quietly that,
looking back at the end of a period, he knew there was no moment at
which it was traceable that she had, as he might say, got inside his idea,
or exchanged the attitude of beautifully indulging for that of still more
beautifully believing him.
It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him but as the most
harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run--since it covered so much
ground--was his easiest description of their friendship. He had a screw
loose for her but she liked him in spite of it and was practically, against
the rest of the world, his kind wise keeper, unremunerated but fairly
amused and, in the absence of other near ties, not disreputably occupied.
The rest of the world of course thought him queer, but she, she only,
knew how, and above all why, queer; which was precisely what
enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds. She took
his gaiety from him--since it had to pass with them for gaiety--as she
took everything else; but she certainly so far justified by her unerring
touch his finer sense of the degree to which he had ended by
convincing her. She at least never spoke of the secret of his life except

as "the real truth about you," and she had in fact a wonderful way of
making it seem, as such, the secret of her own life too. That was in fine
how he so constantly felt her as allowing for him; he couldn't on the
whole call it anything else. He allowed for himself, but she, exactly,
allowed still more; partly because, better placed for a sight of the matter,
she traced his unhappy perversion through reaches of its course into
which he could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt, but, besides
knowing that, she knew how he looked as well; he knew each of the
things of importance he was insidiously kept from doing, but she could
add up the amount they made, understand how much, with a lighter
weight on his spirit, he might have done, and thereby establish how,
clever as he was, he fell short. Above all she was in the secret of the
difference between the forms he went through--those of his little office
under Government, those of caring for his modest patrimony, for his
library, for his garden in the country, for the people in London whose
invitations he accepted and repaid--and the detachment that reigned
beneath them and that made of all behaviour, all that could in the least
be called behaviour, a long act of dissimulation. What it had come to
was that he wore a mask painted with the social simper, out of the
eye-holes of which there looked eyes of an expression not in the least
matching the other features. This the stupid world, even after years, had
never more than half discovered. It was only May Bartram who had,
and she achieved, by an art indescribable, the feat of at once--or
perhaps it was only alternately--meeting the eyes from in front and
mingling her own vision, as from over his shoulder, with their peep
through the apertures.
So while they grew older together she did watch with him, and so she
let this association give shape and colour to her own existence. Beneath
her forms as well detachment had learned to sit, and behaviour had
become for her, in the social sense, a false account of herself. There
was but one account of her that would have been true all the while and
that she could give straight to nobody, least of all to John Marcher. Her
whole attitude was a virtual statement, but the perception of that only
seemed called to take its place for him as one of the many things
necessarily crowded out of his consciousness. If she had moreover, like
himself, to make sacrifices to their real truth, it was to be granted that

her compensation might have affected her as more prompt and more
natural. They had long periods, in this London time, during which,
when they were together, a stranger might have listened to them
without in the