John Marcher carries a singular conviction through his life: that he is reserved for a rare, perhaps terrible destiny that will eventually overwhelm him. Reconnecting years later with May Bartram, a woman who remembers a casual confession he once made in Italy, he persuades her to share in his strange vigil. May becomes the sole keeper of his secret, watching over his life as the two grow older together in a quiet, unspoken intimacy. While Marcher prides himself on his unselfishness and maintains a veneer of social normalcy, his entire existence is an act of dissimulation, a mask worn while he waits for the crouching beast of his fate to spring.
As the years pass, May watches him with increasing sorrow, realizing the true nature of his predicament long before he does. She recognizes that his obsession has effectively paralyzed him, preventing him from ever truly living or loving. When May falls gravely ill, Marcher remains largely absorbed in how her death might affect his own suspense, viewing the mere loss of her as a potential anticlimax to his grand expectation. Yet, even as her health fades, she tries gently to guide him toward the truth, hinting that the fate he awaited has already arrived and passed him by unnoticed in his blindness.
Following May's death, Marcher wanders the globe in search of distraction, finding the world hollow and vain compared to the memory of their shared secret. He returns frequently to her grave, which has become the sole anchor of his identity and the only place where his past feels real. The full weight of his tragedy finally strikes him when he observes a stranger mourning passionately at a nearby grave, displaying a depth of grief and raw human anguish that Marcher has never known.
In that shattering moment of illumination, Marcher realizes the terrible truth of his existence. The beast in the jungle has indeed sprung, but not as a magnificent catastrophe; rather, his doom was his utter incapacity for passion and his failure to love the woman who gave her life to him. He comprehends that by waiting selfishly for an extraordinary fate, he missed the actual human experience that was right beside him all along. Overwhelmed by this belated realization of his profound emptiness, he flings himself face down upon May's tomb in a final, agonizing surrender to his ruined life.
