The Beast in the Jungle

by Henry James
CHAPTER I

What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their
encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by

himself quite without intention--spoken as they lingered and slowly
moved together after their renewal of acquaintance. He had been

conveyed by friends an hour or two before to the house at which she
was staying; the party of visitors at the other house, of whom he

was one, and thanks to whom it was his theory, as always, that he
was lost in the crowd, had been invited over to luncheon. There

had been after luncheon much dispersal, all in the interest of the
original motive, a view of Weatherend itself and the fine things,

intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the arts,
that made the place almost famous; and the great rooms were so

numerous that guests could wander at their will, hang back from the
principal group and in cases where they took such matters with the

last seriousness give themselves up to mysterious appreciations and
measurements. There were persons to be observed, singly or in

couples, bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners with
their hands on their knees and their heads nodding quite as with

the emphasis of an excited sense of smell. When they were two they
either mingled their sounds of ecstasy or melted into silences of

even deeper import, so that there were aspects of the occasion that
gave it for Marcher much the air of the "look round," previous to a

sale highly advertised, that excites or quenches, as may be, the
dream of acquisition. The dream of acquisition at Weatherend would

have had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among
such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the presence of

those who knew too much and by that of those who knew nothing. The
great rooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him

that he needed some straying apart to feel in a proper relation
with them, though this impulse was not, as happened, like the

gloating of some of his companions, to be compared to the movements
of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a

direction that was not to have been calculated.
It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his

closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face, a reminder, yet not
quite a remembrance, as they sat much separated at a very long

table, had begun merely by troubling him rather pleasantly. It
affected him as the sequel of something of which he had lost the

beginning. He knew it, and for the time quite welcomed it, as a
continuation, but didn't know what it continued, which was an

interest or an amusement the greater as he was also somehow aware--
yet without a direct sign from her--that the young woman herself

hadn't lost the thread. She hadn't lost it, but she wouldn't give
it back to him, he saw, without some putting forth of his hand for

it; and he not only saw that, but saw several things more, things
odd enough in the light of the fact that at the moment some

accident of grouping brought them face to face he was still merely
fumbling with the idea that any contact between them in the past

would have had no importance. If it had had no importance he
scarcely knew why his actualimpression of her should so seem to

have so much; the answer to which, however, was that in such a life
as they all appeared to be leading for the moment one could but

take things as they came. He was satisfied, without in the least
being able to say why, that this young lady might roughly have

ranked in the house as a poor relation; satisfied also that she was
not there on a brief visit, but was more or less a part of the

establishment--almost a working, a remunerated part. Didn't she
enjoy at periods a protection that she paid for by helping, among

other services, to show the place and explain it, deal with the
tiresome people, answer questions about the dates of the building,

the styles of the furniture, the authorship of the pictures, the
favourite haunts of the ghost? It wasn't that she looked as if you

could have given her shillings--it was impossible to look less so.
Yet when she finally drifted toward him, distinctly handsome,

though ever so much older--older than when he had seen her before--
it might have been as an effect of her guessing that he had, within

the couple of hours, devoted more imagination to her than to all
the others put together, and had thereby penetrated to a kind of

truth that the others were too stupid for. She WAS there on harder
terms than any one; she was there as a consequence of things

suffered, one way and another, in the interval of years; and she
remembered him very much as she was remembered--only a good deal

better.
By the time they at last thus came to speech they were alone in one

of the rooms--remarkable for a fine portrait over the chimney-
place--out of which their friends had passed, and the charm of it

was that even before they had spoken they had practically arranged
with each other to stay behind for talk. The charm, happily, was

in other things too--partly in there being scarce a spot at
Weatherend without something to stay behind for. It was in the way

the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way
the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky,

reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old
tapestry, old gold, old colour. It was most of all perhaps in the

way she came to him as if, since she had been turned on to deal
with the simpler sort, he might, should he choose to keep the whole

thing down, just take her mild attention for a part of her general
business. As soon as he heard her voice, however, the gap was

filled up and the missing link supplied; the slight irony he
divined in her attitude lost its advantage. He almost jumped at it

to get there before her. "I met you years and years ago in Rome.
I remember all about it." She confessed to disappointment--she had

been so sure he didn't; and to prove how well he did he began to
pour forth the particular recollections that popped up as he called

for them. Her face and her voice, all at his service now, worked
the miracle--the impression operating like the torch of a

lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas-
jets. Marcher flattered himself the illumination was brilliant,

yet he was really still more pleased on her showing him, with
amusement, that in his haste to make everything right he had got

most things rather wrong. It hadn't been at Rome--it had been at
Naples; and it hadn't been eight years before--it had been more

nearly ten. She hadn't been, either, with her uncle and aunt, but
with her mother and brother; in addition to which it was not with

the Pembles HE had been, but with the Boyers, coming down in their
company from Rome--a point on which she insisted, a little to his

confusion, and as to which she had her evidence in hand. The
Boyers she had known, but didn't know the Pembles, though she had

heard of them, and it was the people he was with who had made them
acquainted. The incident of the thunderstorm that had raged round

them with such violence as to drive them for refuge into an
excavation--this incident had not occurred at the Palace of the

Caesars, but at Pompeii, on an occasion when they had been present
there at an important find.

He accepted her amendments, he enjoyed her corrections, though the
moral of them was, she pointed out, that he REALLY didn't remember

the least thing about her; and he only felt it as a drawback that
when all was made strictlyhistoric there didn't appear much of

anything left. They lingered together still, she neglecting her
office--for from the moment he was so clever she had no proper

right to him--and both neglecting the house, just waiting as to see
if a memory or two more wouldn't again breathe on them. It hadn't

taken them many minutes, after all, to put down on the table, like
the cards of a pack, those that constituted their respective hands;

only what came out was that the pack was unfortunately not perfect-
-that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them,