John Marcher’s lifelong suspense

John Marcher’s lifelong suspense is the belief that something rare and overwhelming has been reserved for him, a conviction that turns an undefined future danger into the organizing fact of his life. It shapes how he understands intimacy: because he imagines himself waiting for a fate no woman should be asked to share, he keeps May Bartram beside him as a confidante but rules out marriage. As time passes, the suspense becomes more than fear of what may happen; it becomes fear that nothing will happen in time to make his waiting count.

The Expected Fate

When May recalls the confession John Marcher made years earlier, she describes his deepest belief as a sense, present from his earliest time, that he was being kept for something rare and strange, perhaps prodigious and terrible. He had regarded this as a foreboding rooted in his very bones: the event would come sooner or later and might overwhelm him. Her ability to understand the confession had mattered to him, though he had not fully grasped what telling her had asked of her.

The fate he anticipates is not an achievement, public distinction, or source of admiration. He imagines himself waiting to meet it, face it, and see it break into his life. Its possible consequences range from the destruction of his remaining consciousness or his annihilation to a transformation that would strike at the root of his world and leave him to live with whatever followed. The suspense therefore rests less on a prediction of one definite event than on the expectation of an encounter whose nature and consequences remain unknown.

The Suspense and May Bartram

The belief also determines the limits John Marcher places on his relationship with May Bartram. He sees their growing intimacy as real and assumes a shared life could naturally have taken the form of marriage. Yet he treats his private apprehension as something he cannot invite a woman to share. In his governing image, he is pursuing a crouching Beast in the Jungle: whether the Beast is to kill him or be killed matters less than the certainty that it will spring. He concludes that a man of feeling should not take a lady with him on such a hunt.

That rule makes their companionship an intimate vigil without the commitment he recognizes as its natural alternative. The two do not need to keep discussing the expected fate for it to shape their days; May knows, watches, and waits with him. John Marcher prizes his self-image as considerate and unselfish, and tells himself he must not become coercive or neglect her requirements. Yet this carefulness rests on the very assumption that separates them: he treats the suspense as a burden he must bear alone, even as May has already borne its consequences by waiting beside him.

Time, Failure, and the Threat of Meaninglessness

May’s worsening condition makes John Marcher consider whether the great event might amount merely to her passing away from him. He recognizes how admirable she is, but thinks that her death alone would be an anticlimactic answer to the riddle around which he has built his life. The possibility also sharpens his awareness that May, unlike him, may have waited in vain. What had once been a thought that could amuse him grows grave as her condition does.

Only in the final months of her life does he seriously admit the correction his conviction had excluded: perhaps the awaited fate will come too late. He had trusted that it had time, whether or not he felt young enough to have time himself. Now the dwindling margin of life makes that assurance untenable. His own sense of becoming no longer young joins the fading of the possibilities he has awaited; the two, he comes to understand, are subject to the same law of time.

For John Marcher, failure is not principally bankruptcy, dishonor, punishment, or even the arrival of some terrible fate. It is the prospect of being nothing: of having maintained a lifelong posture of expectation only for the possibilities themselves to grow stale and disappear. He remains willing to suffer something awful if it would be proportionate to the stance he has kept, but fears that he may have been deceived by the suspense itself. The waiting thus turns against its original promise: instead of guaranteeing that a decisive event lies ahead, it threatens to leave him with a life organized around an event that never arrives in time.