Before You Begin

Before you begin.

A man tells a woman his lifelong secret: that he has always felt himself "kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible," a fate crouching in wait for him "like a crouching Beast in the Jungle." She believes him. She offers to watch with him. And so two lives are spent at the edge of a thing that may, at any moment, spring.

Henry James wrote The Beast in the Jungle in 1903, near the height of his late, intricate style, and many readers consider it the most piercing thing he ever did at short length. James was the great American novelist of the unlived life, of the door not opened and the word not spoken, and here he distils that lifelong subject into a single, devastating figure: John Marcher and his patient companion May Bartram, growing old together in Edwardian London while Marcher keeps his strange vigil over a destiny he cannot name.

The novella endures because its trap is one we all half recognize. Marcher is not a villain and not a fool; he is merely a man so convinced his real life is still to come that he never notices it arriving and departing beside him. James turns the slow waste of that mistake into something as suspenseful as any thriller, and as quietly terrible.

The illustrated gallery that follows opens the world of the story: the two souls at its centre, the country house and the grey city where their watch is kept, the bond that ties them, and the long, beautiful, mistaken vigil itself. Step inside, and begin to watch with them.