The Altar of the Dead
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Henry James >> The Altar of the Dead
Transcribed from the 1916 Martin Secker edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD
CHAPTER I.
He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and
loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure.
Celebrations and suppressions were equally painful to him, and but
one of the former found a place in his life. He had kept each year
in his own fashion the date of Mary Antrim's death. It would be
more to the point perhaps to say that this occasion kept HIM: it
kept him at least effectually from doing anything else. It took
hold of him again and again with a hand of which time had softened
but never loosened the touch. He waked to his feast of memory as
consciously as he would have waked to his marriage-morn. Marriage
had had of old but too little to say to the matter: for the girl
who was to have been his bride there had been no bridal embrace.
She had died of a malignant fever after the wedding-day had been
fixed, and he had lost before fairly tasting it an affection that
promised to fill his life to the brim.
Of that benediction, however, it would have been false to say this
life could really be emptied: it was still ruled by a pale ghost,
still ordered by a sovereign presence. He had not been a man of
numerous passions, and even in all these years no sense had grown
stronger with him than the sense of being bereft. He had needed no
priest and no altar to make him for ever widowed. He had done many
things in the world--he had done almost all but one: he had never,
never forgotten. He had tried to put into his existence whatever
else might take up room in it, but had failed to make it more than
a house of which the mistress was eternally absent. She was most
absent of all on the recurrent December day that his tenacity set
apart. He had no arranged observance of it, but his nerves made it
all their own. They drove him forth without mercy, and the goal of
his pilgrimage was far. She had been buried in a London suburb, a
part then of Nature's breast, but which he had seen lose one after
another every feature of freshness. It was in truth during the
moments he stood there that his eyes beheld the place least. They
looked at another image, they opened to another light. Was it a
credible future? Was it an incredible past? Whatever the answer
it was an immense escape from the actual.
It's true that if there weren't other dates than this there were
other memories; and by the time George Stransom was fifty-five such
memories had greatly multiplied. There were other ghosts in his
life than the ghost of Mary Antrim. He had perhaps not had more
losses than most men, but he had counted his losses more; he hadn't
seen death more closely, but had in a manner felt it more deeply.
He had formed little by little the habit of numbering his Dead: it
had come to him early in life that there was something one had to
do for them. They were there in their simplified intensified
essence, their conscious absence and expressive patience, as
personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb. When all
sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if their
purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so little that
they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day,
of the hard usage of life. They had no organised service, no
reserved place, no honour, no shelter, no safety. Even ungenerous
people provided for the living, but even those who were called most
generous did nothing for the others. So on George Stransom's part
had grown up with the years a resolve that he at least would do
something, do it, that is, for his own--would perform the great
charity without reproach. Every man HAD his own, and every man
had, to meet this charity, the ample resources of the soul.
It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke for them best;
as the years at any rate went by he found himself in regular
communion with these postponed pensioners, those whom indeed he
always called in his thoughts the Others. He spared them the
moments, he organised the charity. Quite how it had risen he
probably never could have told you, but what came to pass was that
an altar, such as was after all within everybody's compass, lighted
with perpetual candles and dedicated to these secret rites, reared
itself in his spiritual spaces. He had wondered of old, in some
embarrassment, whether he had a religion; being very sure, and not
a little content, that he hadn't at all events the religion some of
the people he had known wanted him to have. Gradually this
question was straightened out for him: it became clear to him that
the religion instilled by his earliest consciousness had been
simply the religion of the Dead. It suited his inclination, it
satisfied his spirit, it gave employment to his piety. It answered
his love of great offices, of a solemn and splendid ritual; for no
shrine could be more bedecked and no ceremonial more stately than
those to which his worship was attached. He had no imagination
about these things but that they were accessible to any one who
should feel the need of them. The poorest could build such temples
of the spirit--could make them blaze with candles and smoke with
incense, make them flush with pictures and flowers. The cost, in
the common phrase, of keeping them up fell wholly on the generous
heart.
CHAPTER II.
He had this year, on the eve of his anniversary, as happened, an
emotion not unconnected with that range of feeling. Walking home
at the close of a busy day he was arrested in the London street by
the particular effect of a shop-front that lighted the dull brown
air with its mercenary grin and before which several persons were
gathered. It was the window of a jeweller whose diamonds and
sapphires seemed to laugh, in flashes like high notes of sound,
with the mere joy of knowing how much more they were "worth" than
most of the dingy pedestrians staring at them from the other side
of the pane. Stransom lingered long enough to suspend, in a
vision, a string of pearls about the white neck of Mary Antrim, and
then was kept an instant longer by the sound of a voice he knew.
Next him was a mumbling old woman, and beyond the old woman a
gentleman with a lady on his arm. It was from him, from Paul
Creston, the voice had proceeded: he was talking with the lady of
some precious object in the window. Stransom had no sooner
recognised him than the old woman turned away; but just with this
growth of opportunity came a felt strangeness that stayed him in
the very act of laying his hand on his friend's arm. It lasted but
the instant, only that space sufficed for the flash of a wild
question. Was NOT Mrs. Creston dead?--the ambiguity met him there
in the short drop of her husband's voice, the drop conjugal, if it
ever was, and in the way the two figures leaned to each other.
Creston, making a step to look at something else, came nearer,
glanced at him, started and exclaimed--behaviour the effect of
which was at first only to leave Stransom staring, staring back
across the months at the different face, the wholly other face, the
poor man had shown him last, the blurred ravaged mask bent over the
open grave by which they had stood together. That son of
affliction wasn't in mourning now; he detached his arm from his
companion's to grasp the hand of the older friend. He coloured as
well as smiled in the strong light of the shop when Stransom raised
a tentative hat to the lady. Stransom had just time to see she was
pretty before he found himself gaping at a fact more portentous.
"My dear fellow, let me make you acquainted with my wife."
Creston had blushed and stammered over it, but in half a minute, at
the rate we live in polite society, it had practically become, for
our friend, the mere memory of a shock. They stood there and
laughed and talked; Stransom had instantly whisked the shock out of
the way, to keep it for private consumption. He felt himself
grimace, he heard himself exaggerate the proper, but was conscious
of turning not a little faint. That new woman, that hired
performer, Mrs. Creston? Mrs. Creston had been more living for him
than any woman but one. This lady had a face that shone as
publicly as the jeweller's window, and in the happy candour with
which she wore her monstrous character was an effect of gross
immodesty. The character of Paul Creston's wife thus attributed to
her was monstrous for reasons Stransom could judge his friend to
know perfectly that he knew. The happy pair had just arrived from
America, and Stransom hadn't needed to be told this to guess the
nationality of the lady. Somehow it deepened the foolish air that
her husband's confused cordiality was unable to conceal. Stransom
recalled that he had heard of poor Creston's having, while his
bereavement was still fresh, crossed the sea for what people in
such predicaments call a little change. He had found the little
change indeed, he had brought the little change back; it was the
little change that stood there and that, do what he would, he
couldn't, while he showed those high front teeth of his, look other
than a conscious ass about. They were going into the shop, Mrs.
Creston said, and she begged Mr. Stransom to come with them and
help to decide. He thanked her, opening his watch and pleading an
engagement for which he was already late, and they parted while she
shrieked into the fog, "Mind now you come to see me right away!"
Creston had had the delicacy not to suggest that, and Stransom
hoped it hurt him somewhere to hear her scream it to all the
echoes.
He felt quite determined, as he walked away, never in his life to
go near her. She was perhaps a human being, but Creston oughtn't
to have shown her without precautions, oughtn't indeed to have
shown her at all. His precautions should have been those of a
forger or a murderer, and the people at home would never have
mentioned extradition. This was a wife for foreign service or
purely external use; a decent consideration would have spared her
the injury of comparisons. Such was the first flush of George
Stransom's reaction; but as he sat alone that night--there were
particular hours he always passed alone--the harshness dropped from
it and left only the pity. HE could spend an evening with Kate
Creston, if the man to whom she had given everything couldn't. He
had known her twenty years, and she was the only woman for whom he
might perhaps have been unfaithful. She was all cleverness and
sympathy and charm; her house had been the very easiest in all the
world and her friendship the very firmest. Without accidents he
had loved her, without accidents every one had loved her: she had
made the passions about her as regular as the moon makes the tides.
She had been also of course far too good for her husband, but he
never suspected it, and in nothing had she been more admirable than
in the exquisite art with which she tried to keep every one else
(keeping Creston was no trouble) from finding it out. Here was a
man to whom she had devoted her life and for whom she had given it
up--dying to bring into the world a child of his bed; and she had
had only to submit to her fate to have, ere the grass was green on
her grave, no more existence for him than a domestic servant he had
replaced. The frivolity, the indecency of it made Stransom's eyes
fill; and he had that evening a sturdy sense that he alone, in a
world without delicacy, had a right to hold up his head. While he
smoked, after dinner, he had a book in his lap, but he had no eyes
for his page: his eyes, in the swarming void of things, seemed to
have caught Kate Creston's, and it was into their sad silences he
looked. It was to him her sentient spirit had turned, knowing it
to be of her he would think. He thought for a long time of how the
closed eyes of dead women could still live--how they could open
again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their
last. They had looks that survived--had them as great poets had
quoted lines.
The newspaper lay by his chair--the thing that came in the
afternoon and the servants thought one wanted; without sense for
what was in it he had mechanically unfolded and then dropped it.
Before he went to bed he took it up, and this time, at the top of a
paragraph, he was caught by five words that made him start. He
stood staring, before the fire, at the "Death of Sir Acton Hague,
K.C.B.," the man who ten years earlier had been the nearest of his
friends and whose deposition from this eminence had practically
left it without an occupant. He had seen him after their rupture,
but hadn't now seen him for years. Standing there before the fire
he turned cold as he read what had befallen him. Promoted a short
time previous to the governorship of the Westward Islands, Acton
Hague had died, in the bleak honour of this exile, of an illness
consequent on the bite of a poisonous snake. His career was
compressed by the newspaper into a dozen lines, the perusal of
which excited on George Stransom's part no warmer feeling than one
of relief at the absence of any mention of their quarrel, an
incident accidentally tainted at the time, thanks to their joint
immersion in large affairs, with a horrible publicity. Public
indeed was the wrong Stransom had, to his own sense, suffered, the
insult he had blankly taken from the only man with whom he had ever
been intimate; the friend, almost adored, of his University years,
the subject, later, of his passionate loyalty: so public that he
had never spoken of it to a human creature, so public that he had
completely overlooked it. It had made the difference for him that
friendship too was all over, but it had only made just that one.
The shock of interests had been private, intensely so; but the
action taken by Hague had been in the face of men. To-day it all
seemed to have occurred merely to the end that George Stransom
should think of him as "Hague" and measure exactly how much he
himself could resemble a stone. He went cold, suddenly and
horribly cold, to bed.
CHAPTER III.
The next day, in the afternoon, in the great grey suburb, he knew
his long walk had tired him. In the dreadful cemetery alone he had
been on his feet an hour. Instinctively, coming back, they had
taken him a devious course, and it was a desert in which no
circling cabman hovered over possible prey. He paused on a corner
and measured the dreariness; then he made out through the gathered
dusk that he was in one of those tracts of London which are less
gloomy by night than by day, because, in the former case of the
civil gift of light. By day there was nothing, but by night there
were lamps, and George Stransom was in a mood that made lamps good
in themselves. It wasn't that they could show him anything, it was
only that they could burn clear. To his surprise, however, after a
while, they did show him something: the arch of a high doorway
approached by a low terrace of steps, in the depth of which--it
formed a dim vestibule--the raising of a curtain at the moment he
passed gave him a glimpse of an avenue of gloom with a glow of
tapers at the end. He stopped and looked up, recognising the place
as a church. The thought quickly came to him that since he was
tired he might rest there; so that after a moment he had in turn
pushed up the leathern curtain and gone in. It was a temple of the
old persuasion, and there had evidently been a function--perhaps a
service for the dead; the high altar was still a blaze of candles.
This was an exhibition he always liked, and he dropped into a seat
with relief. More than it had ever yet come home to him it struck
him as good there should be churches.
This one was almost empty and the other altars were dim; a verger
shuffled about, an old woman coughed, but it seemed to Stransom
there was hospitality in the thick sweet air. Was it only the
savour of the incense or was it something of larger intention? He
had at any rate quitted the great grey suburb and come nearer to
the warm centre. He presently ceased to feel intrusive, gaining at
last even a sense of community with the only worshipper in his
neighbourhood, the sombre presence of a woman, in mourning
unrelieved, whose back was all he could see of her and who had sunk
deep into prayer at no great distance from him. He wished he could
sink, like her, to the very bottom, be as motionless, as rapt in
prostration. After a few moments he shifted his seat; it was
almost indelicate to be so aware of her. But Stransom subsequently
quite lost himself, floating away on the sea of light. If
occasions like this had been more frequent in his life he would
have had more present the great original type, set up in a myriad
temples, of the unapproachable shrine he had erected in his mind.
That shrine had begun in vague likeness to church pomps, but the
echo had ended by growing more distinct than the sound. The sound
now rang out, the type blazed at him with all its fires and with a
mystery of radiance in which endless meanings could glow. The
thing became as he sat there his appropriate altar and each starry
candle an appropriate vow. He numbered them, named them, grouped
them--it was the silent roll-call of his Dead. They made together
a brightness vast and intense, a brightness in which the mere
chapel of his thoughts grew so dim that as it faded away he asked
himself if he shouldn't find his real comfort in some material act,
some outward worship.
This idea took possession of him while, at a distance, the black-
robed lady continued prostrate; he was quietly thrilled with his
conception, which at last brought him to his feet in the sudden
excitement of a plan. He wandered softly through the aisles,
pausing in the different chapels, all save one applied to a special
devotion. It was in this clear recess, lampless and unapplied,
that he stood longest--the length of time it took him fully to
grasp the conception of gilding it with his bounty. He should
snatch it from no other rites and associate it with nothing
profane; he would simply take it as it should be given up to him
and make it a masterpiece of splendour and a mountain of fire.
Tended sacredly all the year, with the sanctifying church round it,
it would always be ready for his offices. There would be
difficulties, but from the first they presented themselves only as
difficulties surmounted. Even for a person so little affiliated
the thing would be a matter of arrangement. He saw it all in
advance, and how bright in especial the place would become to him
in the intermissions of toil and the dusk of afternoons; how rich
in assurance at all times, but especially in the indifferent world.
Before withdrawing he drew nearer again to the spot where he had
first sat down, and in the movement he met the lady whom he had
seen praying and who was now on her way to the door. She passed
him quickly, and he had only a glimpse of her pale face and her
unconscious, almost sightless eyes. For that instant she looked
faded and handsome.
This was the origin of the rites more public, yet certainly
esoteric, that he at last found himself able to establish. It took
a long time, it took a year, and both the process and the result
would have been--for any who knew--a vivid picture of his good
faith. No one did know, in fact--no one but the bland
ecclesiastics whose acquaintance he had promptly sought, whose
objections he had softly overridden, whose curiosity and sympathy
he had artfully charmed, whose assent to his eccentric munificence
he had eventually won, and who had asked for concessions in
exchange for indulgences. Stransom had of course at an early stage
of his enquiry been referred to the Bishop, and the Bishop had been
delightfully human, the Bishop had been almost amused. Success was
within sight, at any rate from the moment the attitude of those
whom it concerned became liberal in response to liberality. The
altar and the sacred shell that half encircled it, consecrated to
an ostensible and customary worship, were to be splendidly
maintained; all that Stransom reserved to himself was the number of
his lights and the free enjoyment of his intention. When the
intention had taken complete effect the enjoyment became even
greater than he had ventured to hope. He liked to think of this
effect when far from it, liked to convince himself of it yet again
when near. He was not often indeed so near as that a visit to it
hadn't perforce something of the patience of a pilgrimage; but the
time he gave to his devotion came to seem to him more a
contribution to his other interests than a betrayal of them. Even
a loaded life might be easier when one had added a new necessity to
it.
How much easier was probably never guessed by those who simply knew
there were hours when he disappeared and for many of whom there was
a vulgar reading of what they used to call his plunges. These
plunges were into depths quieter than the deep sea-caves, and the
habit had at the end of a year or two become the one it would have
cost him most to relinquish. Now they had really, his Dead,
something that was indefensibly theirs; and he liked to think that
they might in cases be the Dead of others, as well as that the Dead
of others might be invoked there under the protection of what he
had done. Whoever bent a knee on the carpet he had laid down
appeared to him to act in the spirit of his intention. Each of his
lights had a name for him, and from time to time a new light was
kindled. This was what he had fundamentally agreed for, that there
should always be room for them all. What those who passed or
lingered saw was simply the most resplendent of the altars called
suddenly into vivid usefulness, with a quiet elderly man, for whom
it evidently had a fascination, often seated there in a maze or a
doze; but half the satisfaction of the spot for this mysterious and
fitful worshipper was that he found the years of his life there,
and the ties, the affections, the struggles, the submissions, the
conquests, if there had been such, a record of that adventurous
journey in which the beginnings and the endings of human relations
are the lettered mile-stones. He had in general little taste for
the past as a part of his own history; at other times and in other
places it mostly seemed to him pitiful to consider and impossible
to repair; but on these occasions he accepted it with something of
that positive gladness with which one adjusts one's self to an ache
that begins to succumb to treatment. To the treatment of time the
malady of life begins at a given moment to succumb; and these were
doubtless the hours at which that truth most came home to him. The
day was written for him there on which he had first become
acquainted with death, and the successive phases of the
acquaintance were marked each with a flame.
The flames were gathering thick at present, for Stransom had
entered that dark defile of our earthly descent in which some one
dies every day. It was only yesterday that Kate Creston had
flashed out her white fire; yet already there were younger stars
ablaze on the tips of the tapers. Various persons in whom his
interest had not been intense drew closer to him by entering this
company. He went over it, head by head, till he felt like the
shepherd of a huddled flock, with all a shepherd's vision of
differences imperceptible. He knew his candles apart, up to the
colour of the flame, and would still have known them had their
positions all been changed. To other imaginations they might stand
for other things--that they should stand for something to be hushed
before was all he desired; but he was intensely conscious of the
personal note of each and of the distinguishable way it contributed
to the concert. There were hours at which he almost caught himself
wishing that certain of his friends would now die, that he might
establish with them in this manner a connexion more charming than,
as it happened, it was possible to enjoy with them in life. In
regard to those from whom one was separated by the long curves of
the globe such a connexion could only be an improvement: it
brought them instantly within reach. Of course there were gaps in
the constellation, for Stransom knew he could only pretend to act
for his own, and it wasn't every figure passing before his eyes
into the great obscure that was entitled to a memorial. There was
a strange sanctification in death, but some characters were more
sanctified by being forgotten than by being remembered. The
greatest blank in the shining page was the memory of Acton Hague,
of which he inveterately tried to rid himself. For Acton Hague no
flame could ever rise on any altar of his.
CHAPTER IV.
Every year, the day he walked back from the great graveyard, he
went to church as he had done the day his idea was born. It was on
this occasion, as it happened, after a year had passed, that he
began to observe his altar to be haunted by a worshipper at least
as frequent as himself. Others of the faithful, and in the rest of
the church, came and went, appealing sometimes, when they
disappeared, to a vague or to a particular recognition; but this
unfailing presence was always to be observed when he arrived and
still in possession when he departed. He was surprised, the first
time, at the promptitude with which it assumed an identity for him-
-the identity of the lady whom two years before, on his
anniversary, he had seen so intensely bowed, and of whose tragic
face he had had so flitting a vision. Given the time that had
passed, his recollection of her was fresh enough to make him
wonder. Of himself she had of course no impression, or rather had
had none at first: the time came when her manner of transacting
her business suggested her having gradually guessed his call to be
of the same order. She used his altar for her own purpose--he
could only hope that sad and solitary as she always struck him, she
used it for her own Dead. There were interruptions, infidelities,
all on his part, calls to other associations and duties; but as the
months went on he found her whenever he returned, and he ended by
taking pleasure in the thought that he had given her almost the
contentment he had given himself. They worshipped side by side so
often that there were moments when he wished he might be sure, so
straight did their prospect stretch away of growing old together in
their rites. She was younger than he, but she looked as if her
Dead were at least as numerous as his candles. She had no colour,
no sound, no fault, and another of the things about which he had
made up his mind was that she had no fortune. Always black-robed,
she must have had a succession of sorrows. People weren't poor,
after all, whom so many losses could overtake; they were positively
rich when they had had so much to give up. But the air of this
devoted and indifferent woman, who always made, in any attitude, a
beautiful accidental line, conveyed somehow to Stransom that she
had known more kinds of trouble than one.