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 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 will now take place.”
She shook her head slowly but rather inscrutably. “You’re far from my thought.”
He continued to look at her. “What then is the matter with you?”
“Well,” she said after another wait, “the matter with me is simply that I’m more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be but too well repaid.”
They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, had turned once more about the little drawing-room to which, year after year, he brought his inevitable topic; in which he had, as he might have said, tasted their i
ntimate community with every sauce, where every object was as familiar to him as the things of his own house and the very carpets were worn with his fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-houses are worn by the elbows of generations of clerks. The generations of his nervous moods had been at work there, and the place was the written history of his whole middle life. Under the impression of what his friend had just said he knew himself, for some reason, more aware of these things; which made him, after a moment, stop again before her. “Is it possibly that you’ve grown afraid?”
“Afraid?” He thought, as she repeated the word, that his question had made her, a little, change colour; so that, lest he should have touched on a truth, he explained very kindly: “You remember that that was what you asked me long ago—that first day at Weatherend.”
“Oh yes, and you told me you didn’t know—that I was to see for myself. We’ve said little about it since, even in so long a time.”
“Precisely,” Marcher interposed—“quite as if it were too delicate a matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might find, on pressure, that I am afraid. For then,” he said, “we shouldn’t, should we? Quite know what to do.”
She had for the time no answer to this question. “There have been days when I thought you were. Only, of course,” she added, “there have been days when we have thought almost anything.”
“Everything. Oh!” Marcher softly groaned, as with a gasp, half spent, at the face, more uncovered just then than it had been for a long while, of the imagination always with them. It had always had it’s incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as with the very eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to them, they could still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that rose from the depths of his being. All they had thought, first and last, rolled over him; the past seemed to have been reduced to mere barren speculation. This in fact was what the place had just struck him as so full of—the simplification of everything but the state of suspense. That remained only by seeming to hang in the void surrounding it. Even his original fear, if fear it as had been, had lost itself in the desert. “I judge, however,” he continued, “that you see I’m not afraid now.”
“What I see, as I make it out, is that you’ve achieved something almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living with it so long and so closely you’ve lost your sense of it; you know it’s there, but you’re indifferent, and you cease even, as of old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the danger is,” May Bartram wound up, “I’m bound to say I don’t think your attitude could well be surpassed.”
John Marcher faintly smiled. “It’s heroic?”
“Certainly—call it that.”
It was what he would have liked indeed to call it. “I am then a man of courage?”
“That’s what you were to show me.”
He still, however, wondered. “But doesn’t the man of courage know what he’s afraid of—or not afraid of? I don’t know that, you see. I don’t focus it. I can’t name it. I only know I’m exposed.”
“Yes, but exposed—how shall I say?—so directly. So intimately. That’s surely enough.”
“Enough to make you feel then—as what we may call the end and the upshot of our watch—that I’m not afraid?”
“You’re not afraid. But it isn’t,” she said, “the end of our watch. That is it isn’t the end of yours. You’ve everything still to see.”
“Then why haven’t you?” he asked. He had had, all along, to-day, the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had it. As this was his first impression of that it quite made a date. The case was the more marked as she didn’t at first answer; which in turn made him go on. “You know something I don’t.” Then his voice, for that of a man of courage, trembled a little. “You know what’s to happen.” Her silence, with the face she showed, was almost a confession—it made him sure. “You know, and you’re afraid to tell me. It’s so bad that you’re afraid I’ll find out.”
All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to her, he had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly drawn round her. Yet she might, after all, not have worried; and the real climax was that he himself, at all events, needn’t. “You’ll never find out.”
III
IT WAS all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date; which came out in the fact that again and again, even after long intervals, other things that passed between them were in relation to this hour but the character of recalls and results. Its immediate effect had been indeed rather to lighten insistence—almost to provoke a reaction; as if their topic had dropped by its own weight and as if moreover, for that matter, Marcher had been visited by one of his occasional warnings against egotism. He had kept up, he felt, and very decently on the whole, his consciousness of the importance of not being selfish, and it was true that he had never sinned in that direction without promptly enough trying to press the scales the other way. He often repaired his fault, the season permitting, by inviting his friend to accompany him to the opera; and it not infrequently thus happened that, to show he didn’t wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind, he was the cause of her appearing there with him a dozen nights in the month. It even happened that, seeing her home at such times, he occasionally went in with her to finish, as he called it, the evening, and, the better to make his point, sat down to the frugal but always careful little supper that awaited his pleasure. His point was made, he thought, by his not eternally insisting with her on himself; made for instance, at such hours, when it befell that, her piano at hand and each of them familiar with it, they went over passages of the opera together. It chanced to be on one of these occasions, however, that he reminded her of her not having answered a certain question he had put to her during the talk that had taken place between them on her last birthday. “What is it that saves you?”—saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation from the usual human type. If he had practically escaped remark, as she pretended, by doing, in the most important particular, what most men do—find the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a sort with a woman no better than himself—how had she escaped it, and how could the alliance, such as it was, since they must suppose it had been more or less noticed, have failed to make her rather positively talked about?
“I never said,” May Bartram replied, “that it hadn’t made me a good deal talked about.”
“Ah well then you’re not ‘saved.’”
“It hasn’t been a question for me. If you’ve had your woman I’ve had,” she said, “my man.”
“And you mean that makes you all right?”
Oh it was always as if there were so much to say!
“I don’t know why it shouldn’t make me—humanly, which is what we’re speaking of—as right as it makes you.”
“I see,” Marcher returned. “‘Humanly,’ no doubt, as showing that you’re living for something. Not, that is, just for me and my secret.”
May Bartram smiled. “I don’t pretend it exactly shows that I’m not living for you. It’s my intimacy with you that’s in question.”
He laughed as he saw what she meant. “Yes, but since, as you say, I’m only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you’re—aren’t you? No more than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like another. So if I am, as I understand you, you’re not compromised. Is that it?”
She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough. “That’s it. It’s all that concerns me—to help you to pass for a man like another.”
He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely. “How kind, how beautiful, you are to me! How shall I ever repay you?”
She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of ways. But she chose. “By going on as you are.”
It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and really for so long a time that the day inevitably came for a further sounding of their depths. These depths, constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough in spite of its lightn
ess and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had all the while not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she didn’t dare to express—a charge uttered just before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. It had come up for him then that she “knew” something and that what she knew was bad—too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left the matter too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher’s special sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch. He circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and widened and that still wasn’t much affected by the consciousness in him that there was nothing she could “know,” after all, any better than he did. She had no source of knowledge he hadn’t equally—except of course that she might have finer nerves. That was what women had where they were interested; they made out things, where people were concerned, that the people often couldn’t have made out for themselves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram was in particular that she had given herself so to his case. He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe—some catastrophe that yet wouldn’t at all be the catastrophe: partly because she had almost of a sudden begun to strike him as more useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an appearance of uncertainty in her health, co-incident and equally new. It was characteristic of the inner detachment he had hitherto so successfully cultivated and to which our whole account of him is a reference, it was characteristic that his complications, such as they were, had never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken about him, even to the point of making him ask himself if he were, by any chance, of a truth, within sight or sound, within touch or reach, within the immediate jurisdiction, of the thing that waited.