Transcribed from the 1916 Martin Secker edition by DavidPrice,
THE ALTAR OF
THE DEAD
BY HENRY JAMES
LONDON: MARTIN SECKER
number five john street adelphi
This edition first published1916
The text follows that of the
Definitive Edition
CHAPTER I.
He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries,and loved them still less when they made a pretence of afigure. Celebrations and suppressions were equally painfulto him, and but one of the former found a place in hislife. He had kept each year in his own fashion the date ofMary Antrim’s death. It would be more to the pointperhaps to say that this occasion kept him: it kept him atleast effectually from doing anything else. It took hold ofhim again and again with a hand of which time had softened butnever loosened the touch. He waked to his feast of memoryas consciously as he would have waked to his marriage-morn. Marriage had had of old but too little to say to the matter: forthe girl who was to have been his bride there had been no bridalembrace. She had died of a malignant fever after thewedding-day had been fixed, and he had lost before fairly tastingit an affection that promised to fill his life to the brim.
Of that benediction, however, it would have been false to saythis life could really be emptied: it was still ruled by a paleghost, still ordered by a sovereign presence. He had notbeen a man of numerous passions, and even in all these years nosense had grown stronger with him than the sense of beingbereft. He had needed no priest and no altar to make himfor ever widowed. He had done many things in theworld—he had done almost all but one: he had never, neverforgotten. He had tried to put into his existence whateverelse might take up room in it, but had failed to make it morethan a house of which the mistress was eternally absent. She was most absent of all on the recurrent December day that histenacity set apart. He had no arranged observance of it,but his nerves made it all their own. They drove him forthwithout mercy, and the goal of his pilgrimage was far. Shehad been buried in a London suburb, a part then of Nature’sbreast, but which he had seen lose one after another everyfeature of freshness. It was in truth during the moments hestood there that his eyes beheld the place least. Theylooked at another image, they opened to another light. Wasit 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 thanthis there were other memories; and by the time George Stransomwas fifty-five such memories had greatly multiplied. Therewere other ghosts in his life than the ghost of MaryAntrim. He had perhaps not had more losses than most men,but he had counted his losses more; he hadn’t seen deathmore closely, but had in a manner felt it more deeply. Hehad formed little by little the habit of numbering his Dead: ithad come to him early in life that there was something one had todo for them. They were there in their simplifiedintensified essence, their conscious absence and expressivepatience, as personally there as if they had only been strickendumb. When all sense of them failed, all sound of themceased, it was as if their purgatory were really still on earth:they asked