by David Lodge
‘I had a look at one once,’ says Joan. ‘I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.’
‘Well, they weren’t written for the likes of us,’ says Burgess. ‘Them books are Literature.’
To Theodora Bosanquet, plying the keys of the Remington in the master bedroom, it is clear that HJ is suffering from a delusion that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. He possesses a great many books about the history of the Napoleonic era, and she has often observed him browsing in them. In his hallucinatory state his brother William and sister Alice have evidently metamorphosed into the siblings of the Emperor, and he is dictating letters to them in his imperial persona – now about the progress of his campaigns (‘We see the beak sufficiently directed in that vindictive intention, during these days of cold grey Switzerland weather, on the huddled and hustled campaigns of the first omens of defeat’), now with instructions for the decoration of the imperial palaces (‘Dear and most esteemed brother and sister, I call your attention to the precious enclosed transcripts of plans and designs for the decorations of certain apartments of the palaces here, of the Louvre and the Tuileries . . .’). These elaborate fantasies are, in their way, impressive evidence of a still active imagination, like the last salvoes of a holed, sinking, but defiant battleship.
The next day Theodora comes into the big sitting room overlooking the river that serves as HJ’s study as well as his main reception room and surprises Minnie standing beside the bookshelves, leafing through an open book, her feather duster lying neglected on a table. Minnie guiltily snaps the book shut and replaces it.
‘What are you doing, Kidd?’ Theodora asks.
‘Oh, nothing Miss! I was just looking.’ Minnie grabs her duster and whisks it over the shelves – not the books themselves, which only Burgess and the master himself are allowed to dust.
‘Looking for what?’
Minnie blushes. ‘Well, that story you mentioned, Miss, the one Mr James wrote. About the beast in the jungle.’
Theodora smiles. ‘You wish to read it?’
‘If you don’t think Mr James would mind, Miss.’
‘I don’t think he would object, but . . .’ Theodora regards the young woman thoughtfully. ‘When did you leave school, Minnie?’ She uses her first name to show the question is meant kindly.
‘Fourteen, Miss. But I was always good at reading.’
‘Very well, if you promise to take great care of the book—’
‘Oh, I will, Miss!’
‘And return it promptly . . . then you may borrow it.’
‘Thank you, Miss.’
Theodora hesitates a moment between The Better Sort, the collection of eleven stories in which ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ first appeared in 1903, and Volume XVII of the New York Edition in which it was reprinted in 1908. She finally chooses the former, as less bulky and intimidating in appearance. Its scarlet cloth binding has faded with the years, though the gilt lettering is still bright. ‘Here you are, then, Minnie.’
That night Minnie goes to bed early, taking the book with her. Instead of switching on the electric light she lights a candle on her bedside table, so that the other members of the household won’t be able to tell from the illuminated slit under her door that she is awake. She opens the book and turns its pages reverently until she finds the story called ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. She reads the first sentence.
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.
Minnie blinks and reads the sentence again. She still doesn’t understand it. She knows the meaning of all the individual words but she can’t make any sense of the way they are joined together. Can this really be the beginning of the story? She turns back a page to confirm that indeed it is. She holds the book closer to the candle-flame and reads the sentence again. Again she is completely baffled. Minnie is used to stories where you are told at the outset who is who – what the names of the heroine and the hero are, and where they live, and what they look like – before the story proper gets going. This sentence seems as if it comes from the middle of something. It doesn’t tell you who ‘him’ is or who the other person is, or what was going on between them except to say, strangely, that it doesn’t matter anyway.
Minnie thinks perhaps everything will become clearer in due course, so she reads on, but the deeper she gets into the story the thicker is the fog of her incomprehension. After a while the two main characters are given names, and there seems to be some possibility of their falling in love, but John Marcher is a cold stick and May Bartram an irritatingly reserved heroine. There is nothing about whether she is pretty or beautiful or what clothes she wears, and there are pages and pages of dense print in long intimidating paragraphs, about some meeting they had in the past, before they start speaking to each other in the story, and then it is hard to know what they are talking about because they keep interrupting each other and answering questions with more questions. Most puzzling of all is that there is no jungle, and no beast, except for one sentence: ‘Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle.’ But what it is Minnie can’t work out. She almost groans aloud at the frustrated effort to understand. The lines of print blur and waver in the candlelight. She yawns and rubs her eyes and pinches herself to stay awake. Then she peeps at the end of the story to see if it is a happy one. It is not. In the last sentence John Marcher flings himself on a tomb that is probably May Bartram’s. That is enough for Minnie. She closes the book, blows out the candle and falls instantly asleep.
The next day Minnie returns the book to Theodora Bosanquet.
‘Did you enjoy it?’ Theodora asks.
‘Well Miss, it’s fine writing, I could tell that, but . . .’
‘But?’ Theodora’s big brown eyes almost twinkle.
‘Well, to be honest, it’s a bit above me.’
‘Yes, Mr James is a difficult writer on first acquaintance. He demands a lot of his readers. But the rewards are great.’
‘Oh yes, I’m sure, Miss. But you need the education for it.’
‘What did you find especially difficult to understand?’ Theodora opens the book and leafs through it.
Minnie hesitates, tempted to reply: ‘Everything!’ Instead she says: ‘Well, I thought it was going to be about the jungle . . .’
‘Ah. The beast in the jungle is just a metaphor. A symbol.’
‘Oh.’ Minnie looks blank.
‘All his life Marcher has had a presentiment – a feeling – that something extraordinary and terrible is going to happen to him, which he compares to a wild animal waiting to spring on its prey.’
‘Oh, I see.’ And Minnie does begin to see.
‘And he discusses with May what it might be – endlessly, obsessively, self-centredly, in meeting after meeting, year after year. Until she dies. And only then does he realise, too late, that she loved him. He realises that nothing ever is going to happen to him because he is incapable of love.’
‘Ah, so that’s what it means,’ Minnie murmurs, almost dreamily, her eyes unfocused.
Theodora finds the last page of the story and reads aloud: ‘“She had lived – who could say now with what passion? – since she had loved him for himself; whereas he never had thought of her (ah, how it hugely glared at him) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use.” You understand?’
‘Yes. Thank you, Miss.’
The telephone shrills in the hall. They hear Burgess answer it, and a moment later he comes into the room.
‘Mrs William James,’ he announces. ‘Telephoning from Liverpool. Her ship docked this morning.’
‘Thank you, Noakes.’ As she goes to take the call, Theodora reflects that the man seems to have no difficulty in answering the telephone. She can’t help thinking that he often pretends to be deafer tha
n he really is, but has no intention of challenging him on this point. One of the last letters HJ dictated to her before his stroke was to the Prime Minister’s private secretary, asking if Burgess Noakes could be given a medical discharge from the army, and citing his deafness as a reason. Putting patriotic considerations aside, Theodora can only hope that the appeal succeeds, for Noakes’s contribution to the care of HJ has been invaluable, and the two female servants, especially Kidd, have seemed much happier since he returned. There has been an acknowledgement of the letter but no further communication to date.
Mrs James arrives at Carlyle Mansions that evening. In her well-made but old-fashioned clothes of black satin and worsted, with her white hair drawn back above her ears and gathered in a knot at the back of her head, and a scrubbed complexion untouched by cosmetics, she might have time-travelled to shabby wartime London from the Victorian age, or its New England equivalent. She insists on seeing Henry straight away, though Theodora warns her that he may be confused – earlier that day he has been under the impression he is in Cork. ‘Why Cork?’ Mrs James wonders aloud. ‘He was there only once in his life, years ago.’ Theodora leads her into the dimly lit bedroom and hangs back respectfully by the door. ‘You may leave us, Miss Bosanquet,’ Mrs James says in a tone that is more like an order than an invitation. Henry lies on his back with the coverlet pulled up to his chin and tucked under his arms. He has been freshly shaved in his sister-in-law’s honour and his big oval head glimmers on the pillow like a gibbous moon haloed by cloud. The lid of one eye droops, half-shut. He raises a hand feebly and holds it out as she approaches the bed.
‘Henry!’
‘Alice!’
That she happened to have the same Christian name as her husband’s sister was always a cause of confused reference in a family already burdened with several generations of Williams and Henrys. She bends and kisses him on the forehead, wondering if he knows which Alice she is. ‘I don’t dare to think of what you have come through to get here,’ he says, a remark which implies that he does know, though ‘here’ might as well mean Cork as Chelsea. But he seems pleased to see her and holds her hand for some minutes, as if comforted by its touch. In fact, she has come through severe Atlantic storms as well as the threat of U-boats to get here, but nothing would have stopped her, for she promised William when he was dying that she would go to his brother when he was in the same extremity. She is sixty-six years of age, but stout in mind and body, and she has had a lifetime’s experience of looking after the illness-prone Jameses. Before falling asleep in the guest bedroom that night she recalls that Henry stopped in Cork on his way back to England from attending his mother’s last illness and funeral in 1882, so perhaps there is a connection between Cork and death in his disordered brain. Her husband, the great psychologist who coined the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’, would have been interested in this example of the association of ideas, and she wishes she could tell him about it.
Mrs James makes it clear the next day that she is taking over command of the household. This is her right, but there is a certain abrasiveness about her manner of doing so which is hurtful to Theodora. In fact Alice is somewhat paranoid about protecting the privacy and dignity of the family, and thinks Theodora has been presumptuous in acting as if she were one of them since Henry’s stroke. She resents Theodora’s occasional references to her employer as ‘HJ’ rather than ‘Mr James’, and particularly disapproves of her correspondence with the notorious Edith Wharton, which Theodora unwisely mentioned.
So Theodora is given to understand that her attendance in the flat is no longer required unless requested for secretarial duties. She considers this treatment unjust, but conceals her hurt feelings. She continues to call daily at the flat to enquire about HJ’s health, and to see him if appropriate, observing increasing signs of strain in the household on these occasions. Mrs James annoys the nurses by interfering in their care of the patient, and she lacks an easy manner with the English servants. Meanwhile HJ’s condition continues to decline, mentally and physically. He thinks he is in Cork again, or Dublin or Edinburgh or New York, and when assured that he is in London he accuses his attendants of being in a conspiracy to deceive him. There are intervals when he seems to acknowledge that he is suffering from delusions, but only to exchange one delusion for another.
‘Will my madness affect the house, do you think?’ he asks Mrs James one day, raising his head from the pillow and clutching her arm anxiously.
‘Do you mean Lamb House, Henry?’
‘No, no,’ he says, shaking his head impatiently. ‘The house! The house! If the gallery should find out . . .’ He lets his head fall back with an expression of extreme apprehension on his face, and she realises that he imagines he is in a theatre.
A few days before Christmas Theodora calls when Mrs James is resting and no nurse is on duty, and takes the opportunity to look in on the patient. He is asleep, awkwardly splayed among cushions and pillows and disordered bedclothes, with his head lolling sideways like an abandoned puppet and his bare feet sticking out from under the blanket. His unshaven face is haggard and his feet are cold to the touch. She wonders, as she rearranges the bedclothes and covers his feet, whether he will live to see the New Year.
Christmas is a dismal feast that year for most people in Britain. It is the second one of the war, and its approach revives ironic memories of a confident phrase bandied about in August 1914. ‘“It’ll all be over by Christmas” – remember that?’ Burgess says to Minnie and Joan as they sit round the kitchen table. ‘Some ’opes!’ Every day he scans The Times, still being delivered to the flat even though Mr James is beyond taking any interest in it, for news of the war. The news is not encouraging. The Gallipoli campaign has come to an ignominious end with the withdrawal of the Allied forces – their smoothly executed evacuation is the only thing in the whole sorry business that has gone according to plan. On the Western Front the big autumn campaigns have stalled in the mud with hardly any significant gains of territory, and the exhausted armies are digging in for the winter and counting their casualties. Half a million British servicemen dead, missing and wounded since the War began, the Prime Minister said, replying to a question in Parliament. ‘You were one of ’em, Burgess,’ says Minnie. ‘Aye, one of the lucky ones,’ he says grimly. Food, though not yet rationed, is in short supply and expensive. Joan Anderson complains that she doesn’t see how she is supposed to make a Christmas pudding without raisins, though she has been promised a goose for Christmas dinner by paying an outrageous premium to the poulterer.
As it happens they scarcely have time to enjoy their dinner. On Christmas Day the patient’s condition takes a new and alarming turn: he becomes restless as well as confused and keeps trying to get out of bed. When they attempt to restrain him he grows angry and abusive. Boxing Day is worse. He insists on being moved into the sitting room, and once Burgess and Minnie get him there, half carrying, half dragging him with his arms draped round their shoulders, he keeps wanting to change his place from one chair to another. He is a heavy man and nearly dead weight. When Theodora calls in the evening she finds the nurse having hysterics in the passage, Noakes and Kidd prostrate in the kitchen, and Mrs James alone in a corner of the sitting room with signs of panic in her eyes. Mrs James complains that she asked Dr Des Voeux to give Henry enough morphine to sedate him, but he refused.
The following day, however, things improve. A couch with wheels fixed to its feet is delivered to the flat on the resourceful doctor’s instructions, and by this means Henry is easily moved from the bedroom to the sitting room. Burgess pushes the couch up to the window so that he can look out at the boats and barges plying up and down the brown waters of the river. It is a view he has always loved and he seems to find it soothing, so it becomes a daily routine to move him to the window. He gazes out for hour after hour, silent and apparently quite content, with Burgess sitting quietly beside him, occasionally offering him a drink of lemon and barley water, or feeding him soup from a bowl �
�� ‘Just like a nurse,’ Minnie reports to Joan Anderson. ‘Fact ’e’s more gentle with Mr James than them regular nurses, if you ask me.’
Minnie always liked Burgess, ever since she was taken on at Lamb House in 1905, but their relationship was different in those days. She was twenty-three and he claimed to be nineteen, but he looked much younger, because of his short stature and fresh, open, snub-nosed face, and he was still called the house-boy then, his job being to clean shoes, knives, doorsteps, windows, run errands and make himself generally useful. In the hierarchy of the servants he was under Mrs Paddington who was housekeeper then, and about equal with herself as parlourmaid, her own greater age and more mature appearance being balanced by his sex and longer service in the household. Their relationship was a bantering, teasing, competitive one at first, like elder sister and younger brother. But in the years that followed Mr James began to groom Burgess to be his manservant – bought him suits of clothes, taught him how to shave him, how to choose and pack his clothes when he went away, gave him books to read to improve his mind, and relieved him of the more menial jobs around the house. Burgess became more polite in his speech and manners – especially when he was on duty – and Mr James became more and more dependent on him for managing the practicalities of life. When Mr James went to America in 1910, with his ailing brother and Mrs James, Burgess went with him, and when he came back months later he was a man of the world, correct and confident in everything he did, and somehow more handsome. He became in effect butler as well as valet, and the tacitly acknowledged head of the servants. Minnie admired him and strove always to impress him with her work, but she didn’t realise she loved him until he went off to join the 5th Battalion of the Royal Sussex in August 1914.
Standing on the doorstep of Lamb House beside Mrs Anderson and watching Burgess walk away down the cobbled hill with Mr James, who was going to see him off at the station, it was suddenly borne in upon her that she might never see him again, and the thought was unbearable. At that moment Burgess turned and waved cheerily at them, and Minnie waved back but burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying for the rest of the day, so that Mrs Anderson told her to get a grip on herself. While Burgess was away she wrote to him regularly, giving him the news of Rye and London and the household, and got back short, cheerful, grateful replies in which however there was never a trace of tender sentiment. He said she would be tickled to know that the other lads in his platoon thought he must have a sweetheart back home to be getting so many letters in such a nice round hand. When the news came, back in May, that he was wounded she nearly fainted, but when it appeared that he was not too badly hurt and had got leave to look after Mr James she was overjoyed, rehearsing in her mind the moment when he would walk through the door and she would throw her arms round the returning hero. But when the moment came Mr James was there, and Joan Anderson too, and Minnie had to be content with a handshake and a kiss on the cheek.