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The Altar of the Dead, by Henry James

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The Altar of the Dead
By Henry James, 1895



I
He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and he disliked
them still more when they made a pretense of a figure. Celebrations and
suppressions were equally painful to him, and there was only one of the former
that found a place in his life. Again and again he had kept in his own fashion
the day of the year on which Mary Antrim died. It would be more to the point
perhaps to say that the day kept him: it kept him at least, effectually, from
doing anything else. It took hold of him year after year with a hand of which
time had softened but had never loosened the touch. He waked up to this feast of
memory as consciously as he would have waked up 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, it was 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 forever widowed. He had done
many things in the world--he had done almost all things but one; he had never
forgotten. He had tried to put into his existence whatever else might take up
room in it, but he had never made it anything but 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 designed observance of it, but his nerves
made it all their own. They always drove him forth on a long walk, for the goal
of his pilgrimage was far. She had been buried in a London suburb, in a place
then almost natural, 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 it
was, it was an immense escape from the actual.
It is true that, if there were no 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 had not seen death more closely, but he 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 tolerably 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 then
ceased, it was as if their purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so