The Beast in the Jungle | Page 9

least pricking up his ears; on the other hand the real truth
was equally liable at any moment to rise to the surface, and the auditor
would then have wondered indeed what they were talking about. They
had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily,
unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become
one of their commonplaces. Yet there were still moments when the
situation turned almost fresh--usually under the effect of some
expression drawn from herself. Her expressions doubtless repeated
themselves, but her intervals were generous. "What saves us, you know,
is that we answer so completely to so usual an appearance: that of the
man and woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit--or
almost--as to be at last indispensable." That for instance was a remark
she had frequently enough had occasion to make, though she had given
it at different times different developments. What we are especially
concerned with is the turn it happened to take from her one afternoon
when he had come to see her in honour of her birthday. This
anniversary had fallen on a Sunday, at a season of thick fog and general
outward gloom; but he had brought her his customary offering, having
known her now long enough to have established a hundred small
traditions. It was one of his proofs to himself, the present he made her
on her birthday, that he hadn't sunk into real selfishness. It was mostly
nothing more than a small trinket, but it was always fine of its kind, and
he was regularly careful to pay for it more than he thought he could
afford. "Our habit saves you, at least, don't you see? because it makes
you, after all, for the vulgar, indistinguishable from other men. What's
the most inveterate mark of men in general? Why the capacity to spend
endless time with dull women--to spend it I won't say without being
bored, but without minding that they are, without being driven off at a
tangent by it; which comes to the same thing. I'm your dull woman, a
part of the daily bread for which you pray at church. That covers your
tracks more than anything."
"And what covers yours?" asked Marcher, whom his dull woman could
mostly to this extent amuse. "I see of course what you mean by your

saving me, in this way and that, so far as other people are
concerned--I've seen it all along. Only what is it that saves you? I often
think, you know, of that."
She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too, but rather in a
different way. "Where other people, you mean, are concerned?"
"Well, you're really so in with me, you know--as a sort of result of my
being so in with yourself. I mean of my having such an immense regard
for you, being so tremendously mindful of all you've done for me. I
sometimes ask myself if it's quite fair. Fair I mean to have so involved
and--since one may say it--interested you. I almost feel as if you hadn't
really had time to do anything else."
"Anything else but be interested?" she asked. "Ah what else does one
ever want to be? If I've been 'watching' with you, as we long ago agreed
I was to do, watching's always in itself an absorption."
"Oh certainly," John Marcher said, "if you hadn't had your curiosity--!
Only doesn't it sometimes come to you as time goes on that your
curiosity isn't being particularly repaid?"
May Bartram had a pause. "Do you ask that, by any chance, because
you feel at all that yours isn't? I mean because you have to wait so
long."
Oh he understood what she meant! "For the thing to happen that never
does happen? For the Beast to jump out? No, I'm just where I was
about it. It isn't a matter as to which I can choose, I can decide for a
change. It isn't one as to which there can be a change. It's in the lap of
the gods. One's in the hands of one's law--there one is. As to the form
the law will take, the way it will operate, that's its own affair."
"Yes," Miss Bartram replied; "of course one's fate's coming, of course
it has come in its own form and its own way, all the while. Only, you
know, the form and the way in your case were to have been--well,
something so exceptional and, as one may say, so particularly your
own."

Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. "You say 'were
to have been,' as if in your heart you had begun to doubt."
"Oh!" she vaguely protested.
"As if you believed," he went on, "that nothing