Altar of the Dead, The

<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN> <h1>THE ALTAR OF<br/> THE DEAD</h1> <p style="text-align: center">BY HENRY JAMES</p> <p style="text-align: center"> <SPAN href="images/p0.jpg"> <ANTIMG alt= "Graphic" title= "Graphic" src="images/p0.jpg" /></SPAN></p> <div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div> <p style="text-align: center">LONDON: MARTIN SECKER<br/> <span class="smcap">number five john street adelphi</span></p> <div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div> <p style="text-align: center">This edition first published 1916</p> <p style="text-align: center">The text follows that of the<br/> Definitive Edition</p> <h2>CHAPTER I.</h2> <p>He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure.&nbsp; Celebrations and suppressions were equally painful to him, and but one of the former found a place in his life.&nbsp; He had kept each year in his own fashion the date of Mary Antrim&rsquo;s death.&nbsp; It would be more to the point perhaps to say that this occasion kept <i>him</i>: it kept him at least effectually from doing anything else.&nbsp; It took hold of him again and again with a hand of which time had softened but never loosened the touch.&nbsp; He waked to his feast of memory as consciously as he would have waked to his marriage-morn.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p> <p>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, still ordered by a sovereign presence.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He had needed no priest and no altar to make him for ever widowed.&nbsp; He had done many things in the world&mdash;he had done almost all but one: he had never, never forgotten.&nbsp; He had tried to put into his existence whatever else might take up room in it, but had failed to make it more than a house of which the mistress was eternally absent.&nbsp; She was most absent of all on the recurrent December day that his tenacity set apart.&nbsp; He had no arranged observance of it, but his nerves made it all their own.&nbsp; They drove him forth without mercy, and the goal of his pilgrimage was far.&nbsp; She had been buried in a London suburb, a part then of Nature&rsquo;s breast, but which he had seen lose one after another every feature of freshness.&nbsp; It was in truth during the moments he stood there that his eyes beheld the place least.&nbsp; They looked at another image, they opened to another light.&nbsp; Was it a credible future?&nbsp; Was it an incredible past?&nbsp; Whatever the answer it was an immense escape from the actual.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s true that if there weren&rsquo;t other dates than this there were other memories; and by the time George Stransom was fifty-five such memories had greatly multiplied.&nbsp; There were other ghosts in his life than the ghost of Mary Antrim.&nbsp; He had perhaps not had more losses than most men, but he had counted his losses more; he hadn&rsquo;t seen death more closely, but had in a manner felt it more deeply.&nbsp; He had formed little by little the habit of numbering his Dead: it had come to him early in life that there was something one had to do for them.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; When all sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if their purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so little that they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of the hard usage of life.&nbsp; They had no organised service, no reserved place, no honour, no shelter, no safety.&nbsp; Even ungenerous people provided for the living, but even those who were called most generous did nothing for the others.&nbsp; So on George Stransom&rsquo;s part had grown up with the years a resolve that he at least would do something, do it, that is, for his own&mdash;would perform the great charity without reproach.&nbsp; Every man <i>had</i> his own, and every man had, to meet this charity, the ample resources of the soul.</p> <p>It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke for them best; as the years at any rate went by he found himself in regular communion with these postponed pensioners, those whom indeed he always called in his thoughts the Others.&nbsp; He spared them the moments, he organised the charity.&nbsp; Quite how it had risen he probably never could have told you, but what came to pass was that an altar, such as was after all within everybody&rsquo;s compass, lighted with perpetual candles and dedicated to these secret rites, reared itself in his spiritual spaces.&nbsp; He had wondered of old, in some embarrassment, whether he had a religion; being very sure, and not a little content, that he hadn&rsquo;t at all events the religion some of the people he had known wanted him to have.&nbsp; Gradually this question was straightened out for him: it became clear to him that the religion instilled by his earliest consciousness had been simply the religion of the Dead.&nbsp; It suited his inclination, it satisfied his spirit, it gave employment to his piety.&nbsp; It answered his love of great offices, of a solemn and splendid ritual; for no shrine could be more bedecked and no ceremonial more stately than those to which his worship was attached.&nbsp; He had no imagination about these things but that they were accessible to any one who should feel the need of them.&nbsp; The poorest could build such temples of the spirit&mdash;could make them blaze with candles and smoke with incense, make them flush with pictures and flowers.&nbsp; The cost, in the common phrase, of keeping them up fell wholly on the generous heart.</p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />