The Sea Lady

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Title: The Sea Lady
Author: Herbert George Wells
Illustrator: Lewis Baumer
Release Date: April 20, 2011 [EBook #35920]
Language: English
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THE SEA LADY
[Illustration: "Am I doing it right?" asked the Sea Lady.
(See page 150.)]
THE SEA LADY
BY
H. G. WELLS
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1902
COPYRIGHT, 1902
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Published September, 1902_
Copyright 1901 by H. G. Wells
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I.--THE COMING OF THE SEA LADY 1
II.--SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 30
III.--THE EPISODE OF THE VARIOUS JOURNALISTS 71
IV.--THE QUALITY OF PARKER 90
V.--THE ABSENCE AND RETURN OF MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 101
VI.--SYMPTOMATIC 133
VII.--THE CRISIS 204
VIII.--MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT 285
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
"Am I doing it right?" asked the Sea Lady _Frontispiece_
"Stuff that the public won't believe aren't facts" 81
She positively and quietly settled down with the Buntings 90
A little group about the Sea Lady's bath chair 134
"Why not?" 160
The waiter retires amazed 170
They seemed never to do anything but blow and sigh and
rustle papers 180
Adjusting the folds of his blanket to a greater dignity 216
THE SEA LADY
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
THE COMING OF THE SEA LADY
I
Such previous landings of mermaids as have left a record, have all a
flavour of doubt. Even the very circumstantial account of that Bruges
Sea Lady, who was so clever at fancy work, gives occasion to the
sceptic. I must confess that I was absolutely incredulous of such things
until a year ago. But now, face to face with indisputable facts in my
own immediate neighbourhood, and with my own second cousin Melville (of
Seaton Carew) as the chief witness to the story, I see these old legends
in a very different light. Yet so many people concerned themselves with
the hushing up of this affair, that, but for my sedulous enquiries, I am
certain it would have become as doubtful as those older legends in a
couple of score of years. Even now to many minds----
The difficulties in the way of the hushing-up process were no doubt
exceptionally great in this case, and that they did contrive to do so
much, seems to show just how strong are the motives for secrecy in all
such cases. There is certainly no remoteness nor obscurity about the
scene of these events. They began upon the beach just east of Sandgate
Castle, towards Folkestone, and they ended on the beach near Folkestone
pier not two miles away. The beginning was in broad daylight on a bright
blue day in August and in full sight of the windows of half a dozen
houses. At first sight this alone is sufficient to make the popular want
of information almost incredible. But of that you may think differently
later.
Mrs. Randolph Bunting's two charming daughters were bathing at the time
in company with their guest, Miss Mabel Glendower. It is from the latter
lady chiefly, and from Mrs. Bunting, that I have pieced together the
precise circumstances of the Sea Lady's arrival. From Miss Glendower,
the elder of two Glendower girls, for all that she is a principal in
almost all that follows, I have obtained, and have sought to obtain, no
information whatever. There is the question of the lady's feelings--and
in this case I gather they are of a peculiarly complex sort. Quite
naturally they would be. At any rate, the natural ruthlessness of the
literary calling has failed me. I have not ventured to touch them....
The villa residences to the east of Sandgate Castle, you must
understand, are particularly lucky in having gardens that run right
down to the beach. There is no intervening esplanade or road or path
such as cuts off ninety-nine out of the hundred of houses that face the
sea. As you look down on them from the western end of the Leas, you see
them crowding the very margin. And as a great number of high groins
stand out from the shore along this piece of coast, the beach is
practically cut off and made private except at very low water, when
people can get around the ends of the groins. These houses are
consequently highly desirable during the bathing season, and it is the
custom of many of their occupiers to let them furnished during the
summer to persons of fashion and affluence.
The Randolph Buntings were such persons--indisputably. It is true of
course that they were not Aristocrats, or indeed what an unpaid herald
would freely call "gentle." They had no right to any sort of arms. But
then, as Mrs. Bunting would sometimes remark, they made no pretence of
that sort; they were quite free (as indeed everybody is nowadays) from
snobbery. They were simple homely Buntings--Randolph Buntings--"good
people" as the saying is--of a widely diffused Hampshire stock addicted
to brewing, and whether a suitably remunerated herald could or could not
have proved them "gentle" there can be no doubt that Mrs. Bunting was
quite justified in taking in the _Gentlewoman_, and that Mr. Bunting and
Fred were sedulous gentlemen, and that all their ways and thoughts were
delicate and nice. And they had staying with them the two Miss
Glendowers, to whom Mrs. Bunting had been something of a mother, ever
since Mrs. Glendower's death.
The two Miss Glendowers were half sisters, and gentle beyond dispute, a
county family race that had only for a generation stooped to trade, and
risen at once Antæus-like, refreshed and enriched. The elder, Adeline,
was the rich one--the heiress, with the commercial blood in her veins.
She was really very rich, and she had dark hair and grey eyes and
serious views, and when her father died, which he did a little before
her step-mother, she had only the later portion of her later youth left
to her. She was nearly seven-and-twenty. She had sacrificed her earlier
youth to her father's infirmity of temper in a way that had always
reminded her of the girlhood of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But after
his departure for a sphere where his temper has no doubt a wider
scope--for what is this world for if it is not for the Formation of
Character?--she had come out strongly. It became evident she had always
had a mind, and a very active and capable one, an accumulated fund of
energy and much ambition. She had bloomed into a clear and critical
socialism, and she had blossomed at public meetings; and now she was
engaged to that really very brilliant and promising but rather
extravagant and romantic person, Harry Chatteris, the nephew of an earl
and the hero of a scandal, and quite a possible Liberal candidate for
the Hythe division of Kent. At least this last matter was under
discussion and he was about, and Miss Glendower liked to feel she was
supporting him by being about too, and that was chiefly why the Buntings
had taken a house in Sandgate for the summer. Sometimes he would come
and stay a night or so with them, sometimes he would be off upon
affairs, for he was known to be a very versatile, brilliant, first-class
political young man--and Hythe very lucky to have a bid for him, all
things considered. And Fred Bunting was engaged to Miss Glendower's less
distinguished, much less wealthy, seventeen-year old and possibly
altogether more ordinary half-sister, Mabel Glendower, who had discerned
long since when they were at school together that it wasn't any good
trying to be clear when Adeline was about.
The Buntings did not bathe "mixed," a thing indeed that was still only
very doubtfully decent in 1898, but Mr. Randolph Bunting and his son
Fred came down to the beach with them frankly instead of hiding away or
going for a walk according to the older fashion. (This, notwithstanding
that Miss Mabel Glendower, Fred's _fiancée_ to boot, was of the bathing
party.) They formed a little procession down under the evergreen oaks in
the garden and down the ladder and so to the sea's margin.
Mrs. Bunting went first, looking as it were for Peeping Tom with her
glasses, and Miss Glendower, who never bathed because it made her feel
undignified, went with her--wearing one of those simple, costly "art"
morning costumes Socialists affect. Behind this protecting van came, one
by one, the three girls, in their beautiful Parisian bathing dresses and
headdresses--though these were of course completely muffled up in huge
hooded gowns of towelling--and wearing of course stockings and
shoes--they bathed in stockings and shoes. Then came Mrs. Bunting's maid
and the second housemaid and the maid the Glendower girls had brought,
carrying towels, and then at a little interval the two men carrying
ropes and things. (Mrs. Bunting always put a rope around each of her
daughters before ever they put a foot in the water and held it until
they were safely out again. But Mabel Glendower would not have a rope.)
Where the garden ends and the beach begins Miss Glendower turned aside
and sat down on the green iron seat under the evergreen oak, and having
found her place in "Sir George Tressady"--a book of which she was
naturally enough at that time inordinately fond--sat watching the others
go on down the beach. There they were a very bright and very pleasant
group of prosperous animated people upon the sunlit beach, and beyond
them in streaks of grey and purple, and altogether calm save for a
pattern of dainty little wavelets, was that ancient mother of surprises,
the Sea.
As soon as they reached the high-water mark where it is no longer
indecent to be clad merely in a bathing dress, each of the young ladies
handed her attendant her wrap, and after a little fun and laughter Mrs.
Bunting looked carefully to see if there were any jelly fish, and then
they went in. And after a minute or so, it seems Betty, the elder Miss
Bunting, stopped splashing and looked, and then they all looked, and
there, about thirty yards away was the Sea Lady's head, as if she were
swimming back to land.
Naturally they concluded that she must be a neighbour from one of the
adjacent houses. They were a little surprised not to have noticed her
going down into the water, but beyond that her apparition had no shadow
of wonder for them. They made the furtive penetrating observations usual
in such cases. They could see that she was swimming very gracefully and
that she had a lovely face and very beautiful arms, but they could not
see her wonderful golden hair because all that was hidden in a
fashionable Phrygian bathing cap, picked up--as she afterwards admitted
to my second cousin--some nights before upon a Norman _plage_. Nor could
they see her lovely shoulders because of the red costume she wore.
They were just on the point of feeling their inspection had reached the
limit of really nice manners and Mabel was pretending to go on splashing
again and saying to Betty, "She's wearing a red dress. I wish I could
see--" when something very terrible happened.
The swimmer gave a queer sort of flop in the water, threw up her arms
and--vanished!
It was the sort of thing that seems for an instant to freeze everybody,
just one of those things that everyone has read of and imagined and very
few people have seen.
For a space no one did anything. One, two, three seconds passed and then
for an instant a bare arm flashed in the air and vanished again.
Mabel tells me she was quite paralysed with horror, she did nothing all
the time, but the two Miss Buntings, recovering a little, screamed out,
"Oh, she's drowning!" and hastened to get out of the sea at once, a
proceeding accelerated by Mrs. Bunting, who with great presence of mind
pulled at the ropes with all her weight and turned about and continued
to pull long after they were many yards from the water's edge and indeed
cowering in a heap at the foot of the sea wall. Miss Glendower became
aware of a crisis and descended the steps, "Sir George Tressady" in one
hand and the other shading her eyes, crying in her clear resolute voice,
"She must be saved!" The maids of course were screaming--as became
them--but the two men appear to have acted with the greatest presence of
mind. "Fred, Nexdoors ledder!" said Mr. Randolph Bunting--for the
next-door neighbour instead of having convenient stone steps had a high
wall and a long wooden ladder, and it had often been pointed out by Mr.
Bunting if ever an accident should happen to anyone there was _that_! In
a moment it seems they had both flung off jacket and vest, collar, tie
and shoes, and were running the neighbour's ladder out into the water.
"Where did she go, Ded?" said Fred.
"Right out hea!" said Mr. Bunting, and to confirm his word there flashed
again an arm and "something dark"--something which in the light of all
that subsequently happened I am inclined to suppose was an unintentional
exposure of the Lady's tail.
Neither of the two gentlemen are expert swimmers--indeed so far as I can
gather, Mr. Bunting in the excitement of the occasion forgot almost
everything he had ever known of swimming--but they waded out valiantly
one on each side of the ladder, thrust it out before them and committed
themselves to the deep, in a manner casting no discredit upon our nation
and race.
Yet on the whole I think it is a matter for general congratulation that
they were not engaged in the rescue of a genuinely drowning person. At
the time of my enquiries whatever soreness of argument that may once
have obtained between them had passed, and it is fairly clear that while
Fred Bunting was engaged in swimming hard against the long side of the
ladder and so causing it to rotate slowly on its axis, Mr. Bunting had
already swallowed a very considerable amount of sea-water and was
kicking Fred in the chest with aimless vigour. This he did, as he
explains, "to get my legs down, you know. Something about that ladder,
you know, and they _would_ go up!"
And then quite unexpectedly the Sea Lady appeared beside them. One
lovely arm supported Mr. Bunting about the waist and the other was over
the ladder. She did not appear at all pale or frightened or out of
breath, Fred told me when I cross-examined him, though at the time he
was too violently excited to note a detail of that sort. Indeed she
smiled and spoke in an easy pleasant voice.
"Cramp," she said, "I have cramp." Both the men were convinced of that.
Mr. Bunting was on the point of telling her to hold tight and she would
be quite safe, when a little wave went almost entirely into his mouth
and reduced him to wild splutterings.
"_We'll_ get you in," said Fred, or something of that sort, and so they
all hung, bobbing in the water to the tune of Mr. Bunting's trouble.
They seem to have rocked so for some time. Fred says the Sea Lady
looked calm but a little puzzled and that she seemed to measure the
distance shoreward. "You _mean_ to save me?" she asked him.
He was trying to think what could be done before his father drowned.
"We're saving you now," he said.
"You'll take me ashore?"
As she seemed so cool he thought he would explain his plan of
operations, "Trying to get--end of ladder--kick with my legs. Only a few
yards out of our depth--if we could only----"
"Minute--get my breath--moufu' sea-water," said Mr. Bunting. _Splash!_
wuff!...
And then it seemed to Fred that a little miracle happened. There was a
swirl of the water like the swirl about a screw propeller, and he
gripped the Sea Lady and the ladder just in time, as it seemed to him,
to prevent his being washed far out into the Channel. His father
vanished from his sight with an expression of astonishment just forming
on his face and reappeared beside him, so far as back and legs are
concerned, holding on to the ladder with a sort of death grip. And then
behold! They had shifted a dozen yards inshore, and they were in less
than five feet of water and Fred could feel the ground.
At its touch his amazement and dismay immediately gave way to the purest
heroism. He thrust ladder and Sea Lady before him, abandoned the ladder
and his now quite disordered parent, caught her tightly in his arms, and
bore her up out of the water. The young ladies cried "Saved!" the maids
cried "Saved!" Distant voices echoed "Saved, Hooray!" Everybody in fact
cried "Saved!" except Mrs. Bunting, who was, she says, under the
impression that Mr. Bunting was in a fit, and Mr. Bunting, who seems to
have been under an impression that all those laws of nature by which,
under Providence, we are permitted to float and swim, were in suspense
and that the best thing to do was to kick very hard and fast until the
end should come. But in a dozen seconds or so his head was up again and
his feet were on the ground and he was making whale and walrus noises,
and noises like a horse and like an angry cat and like sawing, and was
wiping the water from his eyes; and Mrs. Bunting (except that now and
then she really _had_ to turn and say "_Ran_dolph!") could give her
attention to the beautiful burthen that clung about her son.
And it is a curious thing that the Sea Lady was at least a minute out of
the water before anyone discovered that she was in any way different
from--other ladies. I suppose they were all crowding close to her and
looking at her beautiful face, or perhaps they imagined that she was
wearing some indiscreet but novel form of dark riding habit or something
of that sort. Anyhow not one of them noticed it, although it must have
been before their eyes as plain as day. Certainly it must have blended
with the costume. And there they stood, imagining that Fred had rescued
a lovely lady of indisputable fashion, who had been bathing from some
neighbouring house, and wondering why on earth there was nobody on the
beach to claim her. And she clung to Fred and, as Miss Mabel Glendower
subsequently remarked in the course of conversation with him, Fred clung
to her.
"I had cramp," said the Sea Lady, with her lips against Fred's cheek and
one eye on Mrs. Bunting. "I am sure it was cramp.... I've got it still."
"I don't see anybody--" began Mrs. Bunting.
"Please carry me in," said the Sea Lady, closing her eyes as if she were
ill--though her cheek was flushed and warm. "Carry me in."
"Where?" gasped Fred.
"Carry me into the house," she whispered to him.
"Which house?"
Mrs. Bunting came nearer.
"_Your_ house," said the Sea Lady, and shut her eyes for good and became
oblivious to all further remarks.
"She-- But I don't understand--" said Mrs. Bunting, addressing
everybody....
And then it was they saw it. Nettie, the younger Miss Bunting, saw it
first. She pointed, she says, before she could find words to speak. Then
they all saw it! Miss Glendower, I believe, was the person who was last
to see it. At any rate it would have been like her if she had been.
"Mother," said Nettie, giving words to the general horror. "_Mother!_
She has a _tail_!"
And then the three maids and Mabel Glendower screamed one after the
other. "Look!" they cried. "A tail!"
"Of all--" said Mrs. Bunting, and words failed her.
"_Oh!_" said Miss Glendower, and put her hand to her heart.
And then one of the maids gave it a name. "It's a mermaid!" screamed the
maid, and then everyone screamed, "It's a mermaid."
Except the mermaid herself; she remained quite passive, pretending to be
insensible partly on Fred's shoulder and altogether in his arms.
II
That, you know, is the tableau so far as I have been able to piece it
together again. You must imagine this little knot of people upon the
beach, and Mr. Bunting, I figure, a little apart, just wading out of the
water and very wet and incredulous and half drowned. And the neighbour's
ladder was drifting quietly out to sea.
Of course it was one of those positions that have an air of being
conspicuous.
Indeed it was conspicuous. It was some way below high water and the
group stood out perhaps thirty yards down the beach. Nobody, as Mrs.
Bunting told my cousin Melville, knew a bit _what_ to do and they all
had even an exaggerated share of the national hatred of being seen in a
puzzle. The mermaid seemed content to remain a beautiful problem
clinging to Fred, and by all accounts she was a reasonable burthen for
a man. It seems that the very large family of people who were stopping
at the house called Koot Hoomi had appeared in force, and they were all
staring and gesticulating. They were just the sort of people the
Buntings did not want to know--tradespeople very probably. Presently one
of the men--the particularly vulgar man who used to shoot at the
gulls--began putting down their ladder as if he intended to offer
advice, and Mrs. Bunting also became aware of the black glare of the
field glasses of a still more horrid man to the west.
Moreover the popular author who lived next door, an irascible dark
square-headed little man in spectacles, suddenly turned up and began
bawling from his inaccessible wall top something foolish about his
ladder. Nobody thought of his silly ladder or took any trouble about it,
naturally. He was quite stupidly excited. To judge by his tone and
gestures he was using dreadful language and seemed disposed every moment
to jump down to the beach and come to them.
And then to crown the situation, over the westward groin appeared Low
Excursionists!
First of all their heads came, and then their remarks. Then they began
to clamber the breakwater with joyful shouts.
"Pip, Pip," said the Low Excursionists as they climbed--it was the year
of "pip, pip"--and, "What HO she bumps!" and then less generally,
"What's up _'ere_?"
And the voices of other Low Excursionists still invisible answered,
"Pip, Pip."
It was evidently a large party.
"Anything wrong?" shouted one of the Low Excursionists at a venture.
"My _dear_!" said Mrs. Bunting to Mabel, "what _are_ we to do?" And in
her description of the affair to my cousin Melville she used always to
make that the _clou_ of the story. "My DEAR! What ARE we to do?"
I believe that in her desperation she even glanced at the water. But of
course to have put the mermaid back then would have involved the most
terrible explanations....
It was evident there was only one thing to be done. Mrs. Bunting said as
much. "The only thing," said she, "is to carry her indoors."
And carry her indoors they did!...
One can figure the little procession. In front Fred, wet and astonished
but still clinging and clung to, and altogether too out of breath for
words. And in his arms the Sea Lady. She had a beautiful figure, I
understand, until that horrible tail began (and the fin of it, Mrs.
Bunting told my cousin in a whispered confidence, went up and down and
with pointed corners for all the world like a mackerel's). It flopped
and dripped along the path--I imagine. She was wearing a very nice and
very long-skirted dress of red material trimmed with coarse white lace,
and she had, Mabel told me, a _gilet_, though that would scarcely show
as they went up the garden. And that Phrygian cap hid all her golden
hair and showed the white, low, level forehead over her sea-blue eyes.
From all that followed, I imagine her at the moment scanning the veranda
and windows of the house with a certain eagerness of scrutiny.
Behind this staggering group of two I believe Mrs. Bunting came. Then
Mr. Bunting. Dreadfully wet and broken down Mr. Bunting must have been
by then, and from one or two things I have noticed since, I can't help
imagining him as pursuing his wife with, "Of course, my dear, _I_
couldn't tell, you know!"
And then, in a dismayed yet curious bunch, the girls in their wraps of
towelling and the maids carrying the ropes and things and, as if
inadvertently, as became them, most of Mr. and Fred Bunting's clothes.
And then Miss Glendower, for once at least in no sort of pose whatever,
clutching "Sir George Tressady" and perplexed and disturbed beyond
measure.
And then, as it were pursuing them all, "Pip, pip," and the hat and
raised eyebrows of a Low Excursionist still anxious to know "What's up?"
from the garden end.
So it was, or at least in some such way, and to the accompaniment of the
wildest ravings about some ladder or other heard all too distinctly over
the garden wall--("Overdressed Snobbs take my _rare old English
adjective_ ladder...!")--that they carried the Sea Lady (who appeared
serenely insensible to everything) up through the house and laid her
down upon the couch in Mrs. Bunting's room.
And just as Miss Glendower was suggesting that the very best thing they
could do would be to send for a doctor, the Sea Lady with a beautiful
naturalness sighed and came to.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I
There with as much verisimilitude as I can give it, is how the
Folkestone mermaid really came to land. There can be no doubt that the
whole affair was a deliberately planned intrusion upon her part. She
never had cramp, she couldn't have cramp, and as for drowning, nobody
was near drowning for a moment except Mr. Bunting, whose valuable life
she very nearly sacrificed at the outset of her adventure. And her next
proceeding was to demand an interview with Mrs. Bunting and to presume
upon her youthful and glowing appearance to gain the support, sympathy
and assistance of that good-hearted lady (who as a matter of fact was a
thing of yesterday, a mere chicken in comparison with her own immemorial
years) in her extraordinary raid upon Humanity.
Her treatment of Mrs. Bunting would be incredible if we did not know
that, in spite of many disadvantages, the Sea Lady was an extremely well
read person. She admitted as much in several later conversations with my
cousin Melville. For a time there was a friendly intimacy--so Melville
always preferred to present it--between these two, and my cousin, who
has a fairly considerable amount of curiosity, learnt many very
interesting details about the life "out there" or "down there"--for the
Sea Lady used either expression. At first the Sea Lady was exceedingly
reticent under the gentle insistence of his curiosity, but after a time,
I gather, she gave way to bursts of cheerful confidence. "It is clear,"
says my cousin, "that the old ideas of the submarine life as a sort of
perpetual game of 'who-hoop' through groves of coral, diversified by
moonlight hair-combings on rocky strands, need very extensive
modification." In this matter of literature, for example, they have
practically all that we have, and unlimited leisure to read it in.
Melville is very insistent upon and rather envious of that unlimited
leisure. A picture of a mermaid swinging in a hammock of woven seaweed,
with what bishops call a "latter-day" novel in one hand and a sixteen
candle-power phosphorescent fish in the other, may jar upon one's
preconceptions, but it is certainly far more in accordance with the
picture of the abyss she printed on his mind. Everywhere Change works
her will on things. Everywhere, and even among the immortals, Modernity
spreads. Even on Olympus I suppose there is a Progressive party and a
new Phaeton agitating to supersede the horses of his father by some
solar motor of his own. I suggested as much to Melville and he said
"Horrible! Horrible!" and stared hard at my study fire. Dear old
Melville! She gave him no end of facts about Deep Sea Reading.
Of course they do not print books "out there," for the printer's ink
under water would not so much run as fly--she made that very plain; but
in one way or another nearly the whole of terrestrial literature, says
Melville, has come to them. "We know," she said. They form indeed a
distinct reading public, and additions to their vast submerged library
that circulates forever with the tides, are now pretty systematically
sought. The sources are various and in some cases a little odd. Many
books have been found in sunken ships. "Indeed!" said Melville. There is
always a dropping and blowing overboard of novels and magazines from
most passenger-carrying vessels--sometimes, but these are not as a rule
valuable additions--a deliberate shying overboard. But sometimes books
of an exceptional sort are thrown over when they are quite finished.
(Melville is a dainty irritable reader and no doubt he understood that.)
From the sea beaches of holiday resorts, moreover, the lighter sorts of
literature are occasionally getting blown out to sea. And so soon as the
Booms of our great Popular Novelists are over, Melville assured me, the
libraries find it convenient to cast such surplus copies of their
current works as the hospitals and prisons cannot take, below high-water
mark.
"That's not generally known," said I.
"_They_ know it," said Melville.
In other ways the beaches yield. Young couples who "begin to sit
heapy," the Sea Lady told my cousin, as often as not will leave
excellent modern fiction behind them, when at last they return to their
proper place. There is a particularly fine collection of English work,
it seems, in the deep water of the English Channel; practically the
whole of the Tauchnitz Library is there, thrown overboard at the last
moment by conscientious or timid travellers returning from the
continent, and there was for a time a similar source of supply of
American reprints in the Mersey, but that has fallen off in recent
years. And the Deep Sea Mission for Fishermen has now for some years
been raining down tracts and giving a particularly elevated tone of
thought to the extensive shallows of the North Sea. The Sea Lady was
very precise on these points.
When one considers the conditions of its accumulation, one is not
surprised to hear that the element of fiction is as dominant in this
Deep Sea Library as it is upon the counters of Messrs. Mudie; but my
cousin learnt that the various illustrated magazines, and particularly
the fashion papers, are valued even more highly than novels, are looked
for far more eagerly and perused with envious emotion. Indeed on that
point my cousin got a sudden glimpse of one of the motives that had
brought this daring young lady into the air. He made some sort of
suggestion. "We should have taken to dressing long ago," she said, and
added, with a vague quality of laughter in her tone, "it isn't that
we're unfeminine, Mr. Melville. Only--as I was explaining to Mrs.
Bunting, one must consider one's circumstances--how _can_ one _hope_ to
keep anything nice under water? Imagine lace!"
"Soaked!" said my cousin Melville.
"Drenched!" said the Sea Lady.
"Ruined!" said my cousin Melville.
"And then you know," said the Sea Lady very gravely, "one's hair!"
"Of course," said Melville. "Why!--you can never get it _dry_!"
"That's precisely it," said she.
My cousin Melville had a new light on an old topic. "And that's why--in
the old time----?"
"Exactly!" she cried, "exactly! Before there were so many Excursionists
and sailors and Low People about, one came out, one sat and brushed it
in the sun. And then of course it really _was_ possible to do it up. But
now----"
She made a petulant gesture and looked gravely at Melville, biting her
lip the while. My cousin made a sympathetic noise. "The horrid modern
spirit," he said--almost automatically....
But though fiction and fashion appear to be so regrettably dominant in
the nourishment of the mer-mind, it must not be supposed that the most
serious side of our reading never reaches the bottom of the sea. There
was, for example, a case quite recently, the Sea Lady said, of the
captain of a sailing ship whose mind had become unhinged by the
huckstering uproar of the _Times_ and _Daily Mail_, and who had not only
bought a second-hand copy of the _Times_ reprint of the Encyclopædia
Britannica, but also that dense collection of literary snacks and
samples, that All-Literature Sausage which has been compressed under the
weighty editing of Doctor Richard Garnett. It has long been notorious
that even the greatest minds of the past were far too copious and
confusing in their--as the word goes--lubrications. Doctor Garnett, it
is alleged, has seized the gist and presented it so compactly that
almost any business man now may take hold of it without hindrance to his
more serious occupations. The unfortunate and misguided seaman seems to
have carried the entire collection aboard with him, with the pretty
evident intention of coming to land in Sydney the wisest man alive--a
Hindoo-minded thing to do. The result might have been anticipated. The
mass shifted in the night, threw the whole weight of the science of the
middle nineteenth century and the literature of all time, in a
virulently concentrated state, on one side of his little vessel and
capsized it instantly....
The ship, the Sea Lady said, dropped into the abyss as if it were loaded
with lead, and its crew and other movables did not follow it down until
much later in the day. The captain was the first to arrive, said the Sea
Lady, and it is a curious fact, due probably to some preliminary
dippings into his purchase, that he came head first, instead of feet
down and limbs expanded in the customary way....
However, such exceptional windfalls avail little against the rain of
light literature that is constantly going on. The novel and the
newspaper remain the world's reading even at the bottom of the sea. As
subsequent events would seem to show, it must have been from the common
latter-day novel and the newspaper that the Sea Lady derived her ideas
of human life and sentiment and the inspiration of her visit. And if at
times she seemed to underestimate the nobler tendencies of the human
spirit, if at times she seemed disposed to treat Adeline Glendower and
many of the deeper things of life with a certain sceptical levity, if
she did at last indisputably subordinate reason and right feeling to
passion, it is only just to her, and to those deeper issues, that we
should ascribe her aberrations to their proper cause....
II
My cousin Melville, I was saying, did at one time or another get a
vague, a very vague conception of what that deep-sea world was like. But
whether his conception has any quality of truth in it is more than I
dare say. He gives me an impression of a very strange world indeed, a
green luminous fluidity in which these beings float, a world lit by
great shining monsters that drift athwart it, and by waving forests of
nebulous luminosity amidst which the little fishes drift like netted
stars. It is a world with neither sitting, nor standing, nor going, nor
coming, through which its inhabitants float and drift as one floats and
drifts in dreams. And the way they live there! "My dear man!" said
Melville, "it must be like a painted ceiling!..."
I do not even feel certain that it is in the sea particularly that this
world of the Sea Lady is to be found. But about those saturated books
and drowned scraps of paper, you say? Things are not always what they
seem, and she told him all of that, we must reflect, one laughing
afternoon.
She could appear, at times, he says, as real as you or I, and again came
mystery all about her. There were times when it seemed to him you might
have hurt her or killed her as you can hurt and kill anyone--with a
penknife for example--and there were times when it seemed to him you
could have destroyed the whole material universe and left her smiling
still. But of this ambiguous element in the lady, more is to be told
later. There are wider seas than ever keel sailed upon, and deeps that
no lead of human casting will ever plumb. When it is all summed up, I
have to admit, I do not know, I cannot tell. I fall back upon Melville
and my poor array of collected facts. At first there was amazingly
little strangeness about her for any who had to deal with her. There she
was, palpably solid and material, a lady out of the sea.
This modern world is a world where the wonderful is utterly commonplace.
We are bred to show a quiet freedom from amazement, and why should we
boggle at material Mermaids, with Dewars solidifying all sorts of
impalpable things and Marconi waves spreading everywhere? To the
Buntings she was as matter of fact, as much a matter of authentic and
reasonable motives and of sound solid sentimentality, as everything else
in the Bunting world. So she was for them in the beginning, and so up to
this day with them her memory remains.
III
The way in which the Sea Lady talked to Mrs. Bunting on that memorable
morning, when she lay all wet and still visibly fishy on the couch in
Mrs. Bunting's dressing-room, I am also able to give with some little
fulness, because Mrs. Bunting repeated it all several times, acting the
more dramatic speeches in it, to my cousin Melville in several of those
good long talks that both of them in those happy days--and particularly
Mrs. Bunting--always enjoyed so much. And with her very first speech, it
seems, the Sea Lady took her line straight to Mrs. Bunting's generous
managing heart. She sat up on the couch, drew the antimacassar modestly
over her deformity, and sometimes looking sweetly down and sometimes
openly and trustfully into Mrs. Bunting's face, and speaking in a soft
clear grammatical manner that stamped her at once as no mere mermaid
but a finished fine Sea Lady, she "made a clean breast of it," as Mrs.
Bunting said, and "fully and frankly" placed herself in Mrs. Bunting's
hands.
"Mrs. Bunting," said Mrs. Bunting to my cousin Melville, in a dramatic
rendering of the Sea Lady's manner, "do permit me to apologise for this
intrusion, for I know it _is_ an intrusion. But indeed it has almost
been _forced_ upon me, and if you will only listen to my story, Mrs.
Bunting, I think you will find--well, if not a complete excuse for
me--for I can understand how exacting your standards must be--at any
rate _some_ excuse for what I have done--for what I _must_ call, Mrs.
Bunting, my deceitful conduct towards you. Deceitful it was, Mrs.
Bunting, for I never had cramp-- But then, Mrs. Bunting"--and here Mrs.
Bunting would insert a long impressive pause--"I never had a mother!"
"And then and there," said Mrs. Bunting, when she told the story to my
cousin Melville, "the poor child burst into tears and confessed she had
been born ages and ages ago in some dreadful miraculous way in some
terrible place near Cyprus, and had no more right to a surname-- Well,
_there_--!" said Mrs. Bunting, telling the story to my cousin Melville
and making the characteristic gesture with which she always passed over
and disowned any indelicacy to which her thoughts might have tended.
"And all the while speaking with such a nice accent and moving in such a
ladylike way!"
"Of course," said my cousin Melville, "there are classes of people in
whom one excuses-- One must weigh----"
"Precisely," said Mrs. Bunting. "And you see it seems she deliberately
chose _me_ as the very sort of person she had always wanted to appeal
to. It wasn't as if she came to us haphazard--she picked us out. She had
been swimming round the coast watching people day after day, she said,
for quite a long time, and she said when she saw my face, watching the
girls bathe--you know how funny girls are," said Mrs. Bunting, with a
little deprecatory laugh, and all the while with a moisture of emotion
in her kindly eyes. "She took quite a violent fancy to me from the very
first."
"I can _quite_ believe _that_, at any rate," said my cousin Melville
with unction. I know he did, although he always leaves it out of the
story when he tells it to me. But then he forgets that I have had the
occasional privilege of making a third party in these good long talks.
"You know it's most extraordinary and exactly like the German story,"
said Mrs. Bunting. "Oom--what is it?"
"Undine?"
"Exactly--yes. And it really seems these poor creatures are Immortal,
Mr. Melville--at least within limits--creatures born of the elements and
resolved into the elements again--and just as it is in the story--there's
always a something--they have no Souls! No Souls at all! Nothing! And
the poor child feels it. She feels it dreadfully. But in order to _get_
souls, Mr. Melville, you know they have to come into the world of men.
At least so they believe down there. And so she has come to Folkestone.
To get a soul. Of course that's her great object, Mr. Melville, but
she's not at all fanatical or silly about it. Any more than _we_ are. Of
course _we_--people who feel deeply----"
"Of course," said my cousin Melville, with, I know, a momentary
expression of profound gravity, drooping eyelids and a hushed voice. For
my cousin does a good deal with his soul, one way and another.
"And she feels that if she comes to earth at all," said Mrs. Bunting,
"she _must_ come among _nice_ people and in a nice way. One can
understand her feeling like that. But imagine her difficulties! To be a
mere cause of public excitement, and silly paragraphs in the silly
season, to be made a sort of show of, in fact--she doesn't want _any_ of
it," added Mrs. Bunting, with the emphasis of both hands.
"What _does_ she want?" asked my cousin Melville.
"She wants to be treated exactly like a human being, to _be_ a human
being, just like you or me. And she asks to stay with us, to be one of
our family, and to learn how we live. She has asked me to advise her
what books to read that are really nice, and where she can get a
dress-maker, and how she can find a clergyman to sit under who would
really be likely to understand her case, and everything. She wants me to
advise her about it all. She wants to put herself altogether in my
hands. And she asked it all so nicely and sweetly. She wants me to
advise her about it all."
"Um," said my cousin Melville.
"You should have heard her!" cried Mrs. Bunting.
"Practically it's another daughter," he reflected.
"Yes," said Mrs. Bunting, "and even that did not frighten me. She
admitted as much."
"Still----"
He took a step.
"She has means?" he inquired abruptly.
"Ample. She told me there was a box. She said it was moored at the end
of a groin, and accordingly dear Randolph watched all through luncheon,
and afterwards, when they could wade out and reach the end of the rope
that tied it, he and Fred pulled it in and helped Fitch and the
coachman carry it up. It's a curious little box for a lady to have,
well made, of course, but of wood, with a ship painted on the top and
the name of 'Tom' cut in it roughly with a knife; but, as she says,
leather simply will _not_ last down there, and one has to put up with
what one can get; and the great thing is it's _full_, perfectly full,
of gold coins and things. Yes, gold--and diamonds, Mr. Melville. You
know Randolph understands something-- Yes, well he says that box--oh!
I couldn't tell you _how_ much it isn't worth! And all the gold things
with just a sort of faint reddy touch.... But anyhow, she is rich, as
well as charming and beautiful. And really you know, Mr. Melville,
altogether-- Well, I'm going to help her, just as much as ever I can.
Practically, she's to be our paying guest. As you know--it's no great
secret between _us_--Adeline-- Yes.... She'll be the same. And I shall
bring her out and introduce her to people and so forth. It will be a
great help. And for everyone except just a few intimate friends, she is
to be just a human being who happens to be an invalid--temporarily an
invalid--and we are going to engage a good, trustworthy woman--the sort
of woman who isn't astonished at anything, you know--they're a little
expensive but they're to be got even nowadays--who will be her
maid--and make her dresses, her skirts at any rate--and we shall dress
her in long skirts--and throw something over It, you know----"
"Over----?"
"The tail, you know."
My cousin Melville said "Precisely!" with his head and eyebrows. But
that was the point that hadn't been clear to him so far, and it took his
breath away. Positively--a tail! All sorts of incorrect theories went by
the board. Somehow he felt this was a topic not to be too urgently
pursued. But he and Mrs. Bunting were old friends.
"And she really has ... a tail?" he asked.
"Like the tail of a big mackerel," said Mrs. Bunting, and he asked no
more.
"It's a most extraordinary situation," he said.
"But what else _could_ I do?" asked Mrs. Bunting.
"Of course the thing's a tremendous experiment," said my cousin
Melville, and repeated quite inadvertently, "_a tail!_"
Clear and vivid before his eyes, obstructing absolutely the advance of
his thoughts, were the shiny clear lines, the oily black, the green and
purple and silver, and the easy expansiveness of a mackerel's
termination.
"But really, you know," said my cousin Melville, protesting in the name
of reason and the nineteenth century--"a tail!"
"I patted it," said Mrs. Bunting.
IV
Certain supplementary aspects of the Sea Lady's first conversation with
Mrs. Bunting I got from that lady herself afterwards.
The Sea Lady had made one queer mistake. "Your four charming daughters,"
she said, "and your two sons."
"My dear!" cried Mrs. Bunting--they had got through their preliminaries
by then--"I've only two daughters and one son!"
"The young man who carried--who rescued me?"
"Yes. And the other two girls are friends, you know, visitors who are
staying with me. On land one has visitors----"
"I know. So I made a mistake?"
"Oh yes."
"And the other young man?"
"You don't mean Mr. Bunting."
"Who is Mr. Bunting?"
"The other gentleman who----"
"_No!_"
"There was no one----"
"But several mornings ago?"
"Could it have been Mr. Melville?... _I_ know! You mean Mr. Chatteris! I
remember, he came down with us one morning. A tall young man with
fair--rather curlyish you might say--hair, wasn't it? And a rather
thoughtful face. He was dressed all in white linen and he sat on the
beach."
"I fancy he did," said the Sea Lady.
"He's not my son. He's--he's a friend. He's engaged to Adeline, to the
elder Miss Glendower. He was stopping here for a night or so. I daresay
he'll come again on his way back from Paris. Dear me! Fancy _my_ having
a son like that!"
The Sea Lady was not quite prompt in replying.
"What a stupid mistake for me to make!" she said slowly; and then with
more animation, "Of course, now I think, he's much too old to be your
son!"
"Well, he's thirty-two!" said Mrs. Bunting with a smile.
"It's preposterous."
"I won't say _that_."
"But I saw him only at a distance, you know," said the Sea Lady; and
then, "And so he is engaged to Miss Glendower? And Miss Glendower----?"
"Is the young lady in the purple robe who----"
"Who carried a book?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Bunting, "that's the one. They've been engaged three
months."
"Dear me!" said the Sea Lady. "She seemed-- And is he very much in love
with her?"
"Of course," said Mrs. Bunting.
"_Very_ much?"
"Oh--of _course_. If he wasn't, he wouldn't----"
"Of course," said the Sea Lady thoughtfully.
"And it's such an excellent match in every way. Adeline's just in the
very position to help him----"
And Mrs. Bunting it would seem briefly but clearly supplied an
indication of the precise position of Mr. Chatteris, not omitting even
that he was the nephew of an earl, as indeed why should she omit
it?--and the splendid prospects of his alliance with Miss Glendower's
plebeian but extensive wealth. The Sea Lady listened gravely. "He is
young, he is able, he may still be anything--anything. And she is so
earnest, so clever herself--always reading. She even reads Blue
Books--government Blue Books I mean--dreadful statistical schedulely
things. And the condition of the poor and all those things. She knows
more about the condition of the poor than any one I've ever met; what
they earn and what they eat, and how many of them live in a room. So
dreadfully crowded, you know--perfectly shocking.... She is just the
helper he needs. So dignified--so capable of giving political parties
and influencing people, so earnest! And you know she can talk to workmen
and take an interest in trades unions, and in quite astonishing things.
_I_ always think she's just _Marcella_ come to life."
And from that the good lady embarked upon an illustrative but involved
anecdote of Miss Glendower's marvellous blue-bookishness....
"He'll come here again soon?" the Sea Lady asked quite carelessly in the
midst of it.
The query was carried away and lost in the anecdote, so that later the
Sea Lady repeated her question even more carelessly.
But Mrs. Bunting did not know whether the Sea Lady sighed at all or not.
She thinks not. She was so busy telling her all about everything that I
don't think she troubled very much to see how her information was
received.
What mind she had left over from her own discourse was probably centred
on the tail.
V
Even to Mrs. Bunting's senses--she is one of those persons who take
everything (except of course impertinence or impropriety) quite
calmly--it must, I think, have been a little astonishing to find herself
sitting in her boudoir, politely taking tea with a real live legendary
creature. They were having tea in the boudoir, because of callers, and
quite quietly because, in spite of the Sea Lady's smiling assurances,
Mrs. Bunting would have it she _must_ be tired and unequal to the
exertions of social intercourse. "After _such_ a journey," said Mrs.
Bunting. There were just the three, Adeline Glendower being the third;
and Fred and the three other girls, I understand, hung about in a
general sort of way up and down the staircase (to the great annoyance of
the servants who were thus kept out of it altogether) confirming one
another's views of the tail, arguing on the theory of mermaids,
revisiting the garden and beach and trying to invent an excuse for
seeing the invalid again. They were forbidden to intrude and pledged to
secrecy by Mrs. Bunting, and they must have been as altogether unsettled
and miserable as young people can be. For a time they played croquet in
a half-hearted way, each no doubt with an eye on the boudoir window.
(And as for Mr. Bunting, he was in bed.)
I gather that the three ladies sat and talked as any three ladies all
quite resolved to be pleasant to one another would talk. Mrs. Bunting
and Miss Glendower were far too well trained in the observances of good
society (which is as every one knows, even the best of it now, extremely
mixed) to make too searching enquiries into the Sea Lady's status and
way of life or precisely where she lived when she was at home, or whom
she knew or didn't know. Though in their several ways they wanted to
know badly enough. The Sea Lady volunteered no information, contenting
herself with an entertaining superficiality of touch and go, in the most
ladylike way. She professed herself greatly delighted with the sensation
of being in air and superficially quite dry, and was particularly
charmed with tea.
"And don't you have _tea_?" cried Miss Glendower, startled.
"How can we?"
"But do you really mean----?"
"I've never tasted tea before. How do you think we can boil a kettle?"
"What a strange--what a wonderful world it must be!" cried Adeline. And
Mrs. Bunting said: "I can hardly _imagine_ it without tea. It's worse
than-- I mean it reminds me--of abroad."
Mrs. Bunting was in the act of refilling the Sea Lady's cup. "I
suppose," she said suddenly, "as you're not used to it-- It won't affect
your diges--" She glanced at Adeline and hesitated. "But it's China
tea."
And she filled the cup.
"It's an inconceivable world to me," said Adeline. "Quite."
Her dark eyes rested thoughtfully on the Sea Lady for a space.
"Inconceivable," she repeated, for, in that unaccountable way in which a
whisper will attract attention that a turmoil fails to arouse, the tea
had opened her eyes far more than the tail.
The Sea Lady looked at her with sudden frankness. "And think how
wonderful all this must seem to _me_!" she remarked.
But Adeline's imagination was aroused for the moment and she was not to
be put aside by the Sea Lady's terrestrial impressions. She pierced--for
a moment or so--the ladylike serenity, the assumption of a terrestrial
fashion of mind that was imposing so successfully upon Mrs. Bunting. "It
must be," she said, "the strangest world." And she stopped invitingly....
She could not go beyond that and the Sea Lady would not help her.
There was a pause, a silent eager search for topics. Apropos of the
Niphetos roses on the table they talked of flowers and Miss Glendower
ventured: "You have your anemones too! How beautiful they must be amidst
the rocks!"
And the Sea Lady said they were very pretty--especially the cultivated
sorts....
"And the fishes," said Mrs. Bunting. "How wonderful it must be to see
the fishes!"
"Some of them," volunteered the Sea Lady, "will come and feed out of
one's hand."
Mrs. Bunting made a little coo of approval. She was reminded of
chrysanthemum shows and the outside of the Royal Academy exhibition and
she was one of those people to whom only the familiar is really
satisfying. She had a momentary vision of the abyss as a sort of
diverticulum of Piccadilly and the Temple, a place unexpectedly rational
and comfortable. There was a kink for a time about a little matter of
illumination, but it recurred to Mrs. Bunting only long after. The Sea
Lady had turned from Miss Glendower's interrogative gravity of
expression to the sunlight.
"The sunlight seems so golden here," said the Sea Lady. "Is it always
golden?"
"You have that beautiful greenery-blue shimmer I suppose," said Miss
Glendower, "that one catches sometimes ever so faintly in aquaria----"
"One lives deeper than that," said the Sea Lady. "Everything is
phosphorescent, you know, a mile or so down, and it's like--I hardly
know. As towns look at night--only brighter. Like piers and things like
that."
"Really!" said Mrs. Bunting, with the Strand after the theatres in her
head. "Quite bright?"
"Oh, quite," said the Sea Lady.
"But--" struggled Adeline, "is it never put out?"
"It's so different," said the Sea Lady.
"That's why it is so interesting," said Adeline.
"There are no nights and days, you know. No time nor anything of that
sort."
"Now that's very queer," said Mrs. Bunting with Miss Glendower's teacup
in her hand--they were both drinking quite a lot of tea absent-mindedly,
in their interest in the Sea Lady. "But how do you tell when it's
Sunday?"
"We don't--" began the Sea Lady. "At least not exactly--" And then--"Of
course one hears the beautiful hymns that are sung on the passenger
ships."
"Of course!" said Mrs. Bunting, having sung so in her youth and quite
forgetting something elusive that she had previously seemed to catch.
But afterwards there came a glimpse of some more serious divergence--a
glimpse merely. Miss Glendower hazarded a supposition that the sea
people also had their Problems, and then it would seem the natural
earnestness of her disposition overcame her proper attitude of ladylike
superficiality and she began to ask questions. There can be no doubt
that the Sea Lady was evasive, and Miss Glendower, perceiving that she
had been a trifle urgent, tried to cover her error by expressing a
general impression.
"I can't see it," she said, with a gesture that asked for sympathy. "One
wants to see it, one wants to _be_ it. One needs to be born a
mer-child."
"A mer-child?" asked the Sea Lady.
"Yes-- Don't you call your little ones----?"
"_What_ little ones?" asked the Sea Lady.
She regarded them for a moment with a frank wonder, the undying wonder
of the Immortals at that perpetual decay and death and replacement which
is the gist of human life. Then at the expression of their faces she
seemed to recollect. "Of course," she said, and then with a transition
that made pursuit difficult, she agreed with Adeline. "It _is_
different," she said. "It _is_ wonderful. One feels so alike, you know,
and so different. That's just where it _is_ so wonderful. Do I look--?
And yet you know I have never had my hair up, nor worn a dressing gown
before today."
"What do you wear?" asked Miss Glendower. "Very charming things, I
suppose."
"It's a different costume altogether," said the Sea Lady, brushing away
a crumb.
Just for a moment Mrs. Bunting regarded her visitor fixedly. She had, I
fancy, in that moment, an indistinct, imperfect glimpse of pagan
possibilities. But there, you know, was the Sea Lady in her wrapper, so
palpably a lady, with her pretty hair brought up to date and such a
frank innocence in her eyes, that Mrs. Bunting's suspicions vanished as
they came.
(But I am not so sure of Adeline.)
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE EPISODE OF THE VARIOUS JOURNALISTS
I
The remarkable thing is that the Buntings really carried out the
programme Mrs. Bunting laid down. For a time at least they positively
succeeded in converting the Sea Lady into a credible human invalid, in
spite of the galaxy of witnesses to the lady's landing and in spite of
the severe internal dissensions that presently broke out. In spite,
moreover, of the fact that one of the maids--they found out which only
long after--told the whole story under vows to her very superior young
man who told it next Sunday to a rising journalist who was sitting about
on the Leas maturing a descriptive article. The rising journalist was
incredulous. But he went about enquiring. In the end he thought it good
enough to go upon. He found in several quarters a vague but sufficient
rumour of a something; for the maid's young man was a conversationalist
when he had anything to say.
Finally the rising journalist went and sounded the people on the two
chief Folkestone papers and found the thing had just got to them. They
were inclined to pretend they hadn't heard of it, after the fashion of
local papers when confronted by the abnormal, but the atmosphere of
enterprise that surrounded the rising journalist woke them up. He
perceived he had done so and that he had no time to lose. So while they
engaged in inventing representatives to enquire, he went off and
telephoned to the _Daily Gunfire_ and the _New Paper_. When they
answered he was positive and earnest. He staked his reputation--the
reputation of a rising journalist!
"I swear there's something up," he said. "Get in first--that's all."
He had some reputation, I say--and he had staked it. The _Daily Gunfire_
was sceptical but precise, and the _New Paper_ sprang a headline "A
Mermaid at last!"
You might well have thought the thing was out after that, but it wasn't.
There are things one doesn't believe even if they are printed in a
halfpenny paper. To find the reporters hammering at their doors, so to
speak, and fended off only for a time by a proposal that they should
call again; to see their incredible secret glaringly in print, did
indeed for a moment seem a hopeless exposure to both the Buntings and
the Sea Lady. Already they could see the story spreading, could imagine
the imminent rush of intimate enquiries, the tripod strides of a
multitude of cameras, the crowds watching the windows, the horrors of a
great publicity. All the Buntings and Mabel were aghast, simply aghast.
Adeline was not so much aghast as excessively annoyed at this imminent
and, so far as she was concerned, absolutely irrelevant publicity. "They
will never dare--" she said, and "Consider how it affects Harry!" and at
the earliest opportunity she retired to her own room. The others, with a
certain disregard of her offence, sat around the Sea Lady's couch--she
had scarcely touched her breakfast--and canvassed the coming terror.
"They will put our photographs in the papers," said the elder Miss
Bunting.
"Well, they won't put mine in," said her sister. "It's horrid. I shall
go right off now and have it taken again."
"They'll interview the Ded!"
"No, no," said Mr. Bunting terrified. "Your mother----"
"It's your place, my dear," said Mrs. Bunting.
"But the Ded--" said Fred.
"I couldn't," said Mr. Bunting.
"Well, some one'll have to tell 'em anyhow," said Mrs. Bunting. "You
know, they will----"
"But it isn't at all what I wanted," wailed the Sea Lady, with the
_Daily Gunfire_ in her hand. "Can't it be stopped?"
"You don't know our journalists," said Fred.
The tact of my cousin Melville saved the situation. He had dabbled in
journalism and talked with literary fellows like myself. And literary
fellows like myself are apt at times to be very free and outspoken about
the press. He heard of the Buntings' shrinking terror of publicity as
soon as he arrived, a perfect clamour--an almost exultant clamour
indeed, of shrinking terror, and he caught the Sea Lady's eye and took
his line there and then.
"It's not an occasion for sticking at trifles, Mrs. Bunting," he said.
"But I think we can save the situation all the same. You're too
hopeless. We must put our foot down at once; that's all. Let _me_ see
these reporter fellows and write to the London dailies. I think I can
take a line that will settle them."
"Eh?" said Fred.
"I can take a line that will stop it, trust me."
"What, altogether?"
"Altogether."
"How?" said Fred and Mrs. Bunting. "You're not going to bribe them!"
"Bribe!" said Mr. Bunting. "We're not in France. You can't bribe a
British paper."
(A sort of subdued cheer went around from the assembled Buntings.)
"You leave it to me," said Melville, in his element.
And with earnestly expressed but not very confident wishes for his
success, they did.
He managed the thing admirably.
"What's this about a mermaid?" he demanded of the local journalists when
they returned. They travelled together for company, being, so to speak,
emergency journalists, compositors in their milder moments, and
unaccustomed to these higher aspects of journalism. "What's this about a
mermaid?" repeated my cousin, while they waived precedence dumbly one to
another.
"I believe some one's been letting you in," said my cousin Melville.
"Just imagine!--a mermaid!"
"That's what we thought," said the younger of the two emergency
journalists. "We knew it was some sort of hoax, you know. Only the _New
Paper_ giving it a headline----"
"I'm amazed even Banghurst--" said my cousin Melville.
"It's in the _Daily Gunfire_ as well," said the older of the two
emergency journalists.
"What's one more or less of these ha'penny fever rags?" cried my cousin
with a ringing scorn. "Surely you're not going to take your Folkestone
news from mere London papers."
"But how did the story come about?" began the older emergency
journalist.
"That's not my affair."
The younger emergency journalist had an inspiration. He produced a note
book from his breast pocket. "Perhaps, sir, you wouldn't mind suggesting
to us something we might say----"
My cousin Melville complied.
II
The rising young journalist who had first got wind of the business--who
must not for a moment be confused with the two emergency journalists
heretofore described--came to Banghurst next night in a state of strange
exultation. "I've been through with it and I've seen her," he panted. "I
waited about outside and saw her taken into the carriage. I've talked to
one of the maids--I got into the house under pretence of being a
telephone man to see their telephone--I spotted the wire--and it's a
fact. A positive fact--she's a mermaid with a tail--a proper mermaid's
tail. I've got here----"
He displayed sheets.
"Whaddyer talking about?" said Banghurst from his littered desk, eyeing
the sheets with apprehensive animosity.
"The mermaid--there really _is_ a mermaid. At Folkestone."
Banghurst turned away from him and pawed at his pen tray. "Whad if there
is!" he said after a pause.
"But it's proved. That note you printed----"
"That note I printed was a mistake if there's anything of that sort
going, young man." Banghurst remained an obstinate expansion of back.
"How?"
"We don't deal in mermaids here."
"But you're not going to let it drop?"
"I am."
"But there she is!"
[Illustration: "Stuff that the public won't believe aren't facts."]
"Let her be." He turned on the rising young journalist, and his massive
face was unusually massive and his voice fine and full and fruity. "Do
you think we're going to make our public believe anything simply because
it's true? They know perfectly well what they are going to believe
and what they aren't going to believe, and they aren't going to believe
anything about mermaids--you bet your hat. I don't care if the whole
damned beach was littered with mermaids--not the whole damned beach!
We've got our reputation to keep up. See?... Look here!--you don't learn
journalism as I hoped you'd do. It was you what brought in all that
stuff about a discovery in chemistry----"
"It's true."
"Ugh!"
"I had it from a Fellow of the Royal Society----"
"I don't care if you had it from--anybody. Stuff that the public won't
believe aren't facts. Being true only makes 'em worse. They buy our
paper to swallow it and it's got to go down easy. When I printed you
that note and headline I thought you was up to a lark. I thought you
was on to a mixed bathing scandal or something of that sort--with juice
in it. The sort of thing that _all_ understand. You know when you went
down to Folkestone you were going to describe what Salisbury and all the
rest of them wear upon the Leas. And start a discussion on the
acclimatisation of the café. And all that. And then you get on to this
(unprintable epithet) nonsense!"
"But Lord Salisbury--he doesn't go to Folkestone."
Banghurst shrugged his shoulders over a hopeless case. "What the deuce,"
he said, addressing his inkpot in plaintive tones, "does _that_ matter?"
The young man reflected. He addressed Banghurst's back after a pause.
His voice had flattened a little. "I might go over this and do it up as
a lark perhaps. Make it a comic dialogue sketch with a man who really
believed in it--or something like that. It's a beastly lot of copy to
get slumped, you know."
"Nohow," said Banghurst. "Not in any shape. No! Why! They'd think it
clever. They'd think you was making game of them. They hate things they
think are clever!"
The young man made as if to reply, but Banghurst's back expressed quite
clearly that the interview was at an end.
"Nohow," repeated Banghurst just when it seemed he had finished
altogether.
"I may take it to the _Gunfire_ then?"
Banghurst suggested an alternative.
"Very well," said the young man, heated, "the _Gunfire_ it is."
But in that he was reckoning without the editor of the _Gunfire_.
III
It must have been quite soon after that, that I myself heard the first
mention of the mermaid, little recking that at last it would fall to me
to write her history. I was on one of my rare visits to London, and
Micklethwaite was giving me lunch at the Penwiper Club, certainly one of
the best dozen literary clubs in London. I noted the rising young
journalist at a table near the door, lunching alone. All about him
tables were vacant, though the other parts of the room were crowded. He
sat with his face towards the door, and he kept looking up whenever any
one came in, as if he expected some one who never came. Once distinctly
I saw him beckon to a man, but the man did not respond.
"Look here, Micklethwaite," I said, "why is everybody avoiding that man
over there? I noticed just now in the smoking-room that he seemed to be
trying to get into conversation with some one and that a kind of
taboo----"
Micklethwaite stared over his fork. "Ra-ther," he said.
"But what's he done?"
"He's a fool," said Micklethwaite with his mouth full, evidently
annoyed. "Ugh," he said as soon as he was free to do so.
I waited a little while.
"What's he done?" I ventured.
Micklethwaite did not answer for a moment and crammed things into his
mouth vindictively, bread and all sorts of things. Then leaning towards
me in a confidential manner he made indignant noises which I could not
clearly distinguish as words.
"Oh!" I said, when he had done.
"Yes," said Micklethwaite. He swallowed and then poured himself
wine--splashing the tablecloth.
"He had _me_ for an hour very nearly the other day."
"Yes?" I said.
"Silly fool," said Micklethwaite.
I was afraid it was all over, but luckily he gave me an opening again
after gulping down his wine.
"He leads you on to argue," he said.
"That----?"
"That he can't prove it."
"Yes?"
"And then he shows you he can. Just showing off how damned ingenious he
is."
I was a little confused. "Prove what?" I asked.
"Haven't I been telling you?" said Micklethwaite, growing very red.
"About this confounded mermaid of his at Folkestone."
"He says there is one?"
"Yes, he does," said Micklethwaite, going purple and staring at me very
hard. He seemed to ask mutely whether I of all people proposed to turn
on him and back up this infamous scoundrel. I thought for a moment he
would have apoplexy, but happily he remembered his duty as my host. So
he turned very suddenly on a meditative waiter for not removing our
plates.
"Had any golf lately?" I said to Micklethwaite, when the plates and the
remains of the waiter had gone away. Golf always does Micklethwaite good
except when he is actually playing. Then, I am told-- If I were Mrs.
Bunting I should break off and raise my eyebrows and both hands at this
point, to indicate how golf acts on Micklethwaite when he is playing.
I turned my mind to feigning an interest in golf--a game that in truth
I despise and hate as I despise and hate nothing else in this world.
Imagine a great fat creature like Micklethwaite, a creature who ought to
wear a turban and a long black robe to hide his grossness, whacking a
little white ball for miles and miles with a perfect surgery of
instruments, whacking it either with a babyish solemnity or a childish
rage as luck may have decided, whacking away while his country goes to
the devil, and incidentally training an innocent-eyed little boy to
swear and be a tip-hunting loafer. That's golf! However, I controlled my
all too facile sneer and talked of golf and the relative merits of golf
links as I might talk to a child about buns or distract a puppy with the
whisper of "rats," and when at last I could look at the rising young
journalist again our lunch had come to an end.
I saw that he was talking with a greater air of freedom than it is
usual to display to club waiters, to the man who held his coat. The man
looked incredulous but respectful, and was answering shortly but
politely.
When we went out this little conversation was still going on. The waiter
was holding the rising young journalist's soft felt hat and the rising
young journalist was fumbling in his coat pocket with a thick mass of
papers.
"It's tremendous. I've got most of it here," he was saying as we went
by. "I don't know if you'd care----"
"I get very little time for reading, sir," the waiter was replying.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE QUALITY OF PARKER
I
So far I have been very full, I know, and verisimilitude has been my
watchword rather than the true affidavit style. But if I have made it
clear to the reader just how the Sea Lady landed and just how it was
possible for her to land and become a member of human society without
any considerable excitement on the part of that society, such poor pains
as I have taken to tint and shadow and embellish the facts at my
disposal will not have been taken in vain. She positively and quietly
settled down with the Buntings. Within a fortnight she had really
settled down so thoroughly that, save for her exceptional beauty and
charm and the occasional faint touches of something a little indefinable
in her smile, she had become a quite passable and credible human being.
She was a cripple, indeed, and her lower limb was most pathetically
swathed and put in a sort of case, but it was quite generally
understood--I am afraid at Mrs. Bunting's initiative--that presently
_they_--Mrs. Bunting said "they," which was certainly almost as far or
even a little farther than legitimate prevarication may go--would be as
well as ever.
[Illustration: She positively and quietly settled down with the
Buntings.]
"Of course," said Mrs. Bunting, "she will never be able to _bicycle_
again----"
That was the sort of glamour she threw about it.
II
In Parker it is indisputable that the Sea Lady found--or at least had
found for her by Mrs. Bunting--a treasure of the richest sort. Parker
was still fallaciously young, but she had been maid to a lady from
India who had been in a "case" and had experienced and overcome
cross-examination. She had also been deceived by a young man, whom she
had fancied greatly, only to find him walking out with another--contrary
to her inflexible sense of correctness--in the presence of which all
other things are altogether vain. Life she had resolved should have no
further surprises for her. She looked out on its (largely improper)
pageant with an expression of alert impartiality in her hazel eyes,
calm, doing her specific duty, and entirely declining to participate
further. She always kept her elbows down by her side and her hands
always just in contact, and it was impossible for the most powerful
imagination to conceive her under any circumstances as being anything
but absolutely straight and clean and neat. And her voice was always
under all circumstances low and wonderfully distinct--just to an
infinitesimal degree indeed "mincing."
Mrs. Bunting had been a little nervous when it came to the point. It was
Mrs. Bunting of course who engaged her, because the Sea Lady was so
entirely without experience. But certainly Mrs. Bunting's nervousness
was thrown away.
"You understand," said Mrs. Bunting, taking a plunge at it, "that--that
she is an invalid."
"I _didn't_, Mem," replied Parker respectfully, and evidently quite
willing to understand anything as part of her duty in this world.
"In fact," said Mrs. Bunting, rubbing the edge of the tablecloth
daintily with her gloved finger and watching the operation with
interest, "as a matter of fact, she has a mermaid's tail."
"Mermaid's tail! Indeed, Mem! And is it painful at all?"
"Oh, dear, no, it involves no inconvenience--nothing. Except--you
understand, there is a need of--discretion."
"Of course, Mem," said Parker, as who should say, "there always is."
"We particularly don't want the servants----"
"The lower servants-- No, Mem."
"You understand?" and Mrs. Bunting looked up again and regarded Parker
calmly.
"Precisely, Mem!" said Parker, with a face unmoved, and so they came to
the question of terms. "It all passed off _most_ satisfactorily," said
Mrs. Bunting, taking a deep breath at the mere memory of that moment.
And it is clear that Parker was quite of her opinion.
She was not only discreet but really clever and handy. From the very
outset she grasped the situation, unostentatiously but very firmly. It
was Parker who contrived the sort of violin case for It, and who made
the tea gown extension that covered the case's arid contours. It was
Parker who suggested an invalid's chair for use indoors and in the
garden, and a carrying chair for the staircase. Hitherto Fred Bunting
had been on hand, at last even in excessive abundance, whenever the Sea
Lady lay in need of masculine arms. But Parker made it clear at once
that that was not at all in accordance with her ideas, and so earned the
lifelong gratitude of Mabel Glendower. And Parker too spoke out for
drives, and suggested with an air of rightness that left nothing else to
be done, the hire of a carriage and pair for the season--to the equal
delight of the Buntings and the Sea Lady. It was Parker who dictated the
daily drive up to the eastern end of the Leas and the Sea Lady's
transfer, and the manner of the Sea Lady's transfer, to the bath chair
in which she promenaded the Leas. There seemed to be nowhere that it was
pleasant and proper for the Sea Lady to go that Parker did not swiftly
and correctly indicate it and the way to get to it, and there seems to
have been nothing that it was really undesirable the Sea Lady should do
and anywhere that it was really undesirable that she should go, that
Parker did not at once invisibly but effectively interpose a bar. It was
Parker who released the Sea Lady from being a sort of private and
peculiar property in the Bunting household and carried her off to a
becoming position in the world, when the crisis came. In little things
as in great she failed not. It was she who made it luminous that the Sea
Lady's card plate was not yet engraved and printed ("Miss Doris
Thalassia Waters" was the pleasant and appropriate name with which the
Sea Lady came primed), and who replaced the box of the presumably dank
and drowned and dripping "Tom" by a jewel case, a dressing bag and the
first of the Sea Lady's trunks.
On a thousand little occasions this Parker showed a sense of propriety
that was penetratingly fine. For example, in the shop one day when
"things" of an intimate sort were being purchased, she suddenly
intervened.
"There are stockings, Mem," she said in a discreet undertone, behind,
but not too vulgarly behind, a fluttering straight hand.
"_Stockings!_" cried Mrs. Bunting. "But----!"
"I think, Mem, she should have stockings," said Parker, quietly but very
firmly.
And come to think of it, why _should_ an unavoidable deficiency in a
lady excuse one that can be avoided? It's there we touch the very
quintessence and central principle of the proper life.
But Mrs. Bunting, you know, would never have seen it like that.
III
Let me add here, regretfully but with infinite respect, one other thing
about Parker, and then she shall drop into her proper place.
I must confess, with a slight tinge of humiliation, that I pursued this
young woman to her present situation at Highton Towers--maid she is to
that eminent religious and social propagandist, the Lady Jane Glanville.
There were certain details of which I stood in need, certain scenes and
conversations of which my passion for verisimilitude had scarcely a
crumb to go upon. And from first to last, what she must have seen and
learnt and inferred would amount practically to everything.
I put this to her frankly. She made no pretence of not understanding me
nor of ignorance of certain hidden things. When I had finished she
regarded me with a level regard.
"I couldn't think of it, sir," she said. "It wouldn't be at all
according to my ideas."
"But!--It surely couldn't possibly hurt you now to tell me."
"I'm afraid I couldn't, sir."
"It couldn't hurt anyone."
"It isn't that, sir."
"I should see you didn't lose by it, you know."
She looked at me politely, having said what she intended to say.
And, in spite of what became at last very fine and handsome inducements,
that remained the inflexible Parker's reply. Even after I had come to
an end with my finesse and attempted to bribe her in the grossest
manner, she displayed nothing but a becoming respect for my impregnable
social superiority.
"I couldn't think of it, sir," she repeated. "It wouldn't be at all
according to my ideas."
And if in the end you should find this story to any extent vague or
incomplete, I trust you will remember how the inflexible severity of
Parker's ideas stood in my way.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
THE ABSENCE AND RETURN OF MR. HARRY CHATTERIS
I
These digressions about Parker and the journalists have certainly led me
astray from the story a little. You will, however, understand that while
the rising young journalist was still in pursuit of information, Hope
and Banghurst, and Parker merely a budding perfection, the carriage not
even thought of, things were already developing in that bright little
establishment beneath the evergreen oaks on the Folkestone Riviera. So
soon as the minds of the Buntings ceased to be altogether focused upon
this new and amazing social addition, they--of all people--had most
indisputably discovered, it became at first faintly and then very
clearly evident that their own simple pleasure in the possession of a
guest so beautiful as Miss Waters, so solidly wealthy and--in a
manner--so distinguished, was not entirely shared by the two young
ladies who were to have been their principal guests for the season.
This little rift was perceptible the very first time Mrs. Bunting had an
opportunity of talking over her new arrangements with Miss Glendower.
"And is she really going to stay with you all the summer?" said Adeline.
"Surely, dear, you don't mind?"
"It takes me a little by surprise."
"She's asked me, my dear----"
"I'm thinking of Harry. If the general election comes on in
September--and every one seems to think it will-- You promised you
would let us inundate you with electioneering."
"But do you think she----"
"She will be dreadfully in the way."
She added after an interval, "She stops my working."
"But, my dear!"
"She's out of harmony," said Adeline.
Mrs. Bunting looked out of her window at the tamarisk and the sea. "I'm
sure I wouldn't do anything to hurt Harry's prospects. You know how
enthusiastic we all are. Randolph would do anything. But are you sure
she will be in the way?"
"What else can she be?"
"She might help even."
"Oh, help!"
"She might canvass. She's very attractive, you know, dear."
"Not to me," said Miss Glendower. "I don't trust her."
"But to some people. And as Harry says, at election times every one who
can do anything must be let do it. Cut them--do anything afterwards,
but at the time--you know he talked of it when Mr. Fison and he were
here. If you left electioneering only to the really nice people----"
"It was Mr. Fison said that, not Harry. And besides, she wouldn't help."
"I think you misjudge her there, dear. She has been asking----"
"To help?"
"Yes, and all about it," said Mrs. Bunting, with a transient pink. "She
keeps asking questions about why we are having the election and what it
is all about, and why Harry is a candidate and all that. She wants to go
into it quite deeply. _I_ can't answer half the things she asks."
"And that's why she keeps up those long conversations with Mr. Melville,
I suppose, and why Fred goes about neglecting Mabel----"
"My dear!" said Mrs. Bunting.
"I wouldn't have her canvassing with us for anything," said Miss
Glendower. "She'd spoil everything. She is frivolous and satirical. She
looks at you with incredulous eyes, she seems to blight all one's
earnestness.... I don't think you quite understand, dear Mrs. Bunting,
what this election and my studies mean to me--and Harry. She comes
across all that--like a contradiction."
"Surely, my dear! I've never heard her contradict."
"Oh, she doesn't contradict. But she-- There is something about her-- One
feels that things that are most important and vital are nothing to her.
Don't you feel it? She comes from another world to us."
Mrs. Bunting remained judicial. Adeline dropped to a lower key again. "I
think," she said, "anyhow, that we're taking her very easily. How do we
know what she is? Down there, out there, she may be anything. She may
have had excellent reasons for coming to land----"
"My dear!" cried Mrs. Bunting. "Is that charity?"
"How do they live?"
"If she hadn't lived nicely I'm sure she couldn't behave so nicely."
"Besides--coming here! She had no invitation----"
"I've invited her now," said Mrs. Bunting gently.
"You could hardly help yourself. I only hope your kindness----"
"It's not a kindness," said Mrs. Bunting, "it's a duty. If she were
only half as charming as she is. You seem to forget"--her voice
dropped--"what it is she comes for."
"That's what I want to know."
"I'm sure in these days, with so much materialism about and such
wickedness everywhere, when everybody who has a soul seems trying to
lose it, to find any one who hadn't a soul and who is trying to find
one----"
"But _is_ she trying to get one?"
"Mr. Flange comes twice every week. He would come oftener, as you know,
if there wasn't so much confirmation about."
"And when he comes he sits and touches her hand if he can, and he talks
in his lowest voice, and she sits and smiles--she almost laughs outright
at the things he says."
"Because he has to win his way with her. Surely Mr. Flange may do what
he can to make religion attractive?"
"I don't believe she believes she will get a soul. I don't believe she
wants one a bit."
She turned towards the door as if she had done.
Mrs. Bunting's pink was now permanent. She had brought up a son and two
daughters, and besides she had brought down a husband to "My dear, how
was _I_ to know?" and when it was necessary to be firm--even with
Adeline Glendower--she knew how to be firm just as well as anybody.
"My dear," she began in her very firmest quiet manner, "I am positive
you misjudge Miss Waters. Trivial she may be--on the surface at any
rate. Perhaps she laughs and makes fun a little. There are different
ways of looking at things. But I am sure that at bottom she is just as
serious, just as grave, as--any one. You judge her hastily. I am sure if
you knew her better--as I do----"
Mrs. Bunting left an eloquent pause.
Miss Glendower had two little pink flushes in her cheeks. She turned
with her hand on the door.
"At any rate," she said, "I am sure that Harry will agree with me that
she can be no help to our cause. We have our work to do and it is
something more than just vulgar electioneering. We have to develop and
establish ideas. Harry has views that are new and wide-reaching. We want
to put our whole strength into this work. Now especially. And her
presence----"
She paused for a moment. "It is a digression. She divides things. She
puts it all wrong. She has a way of concentrating attention about
herself. She alters the values of things. She prevents my being
single-minded, she will prevent Harry being single-minded----"
"I think, my dear, that you might trust my judgment a little," said Mrs.
Bunting and paused.
Miss Glendower opened her mouth and shut it again, without speaking. It
became evident finality was attained. Nothing remained to be said but
the regrettable.
The door opened and closed smartly and Mrs. Bunting was alone.
Within an hour they all met at the luncheon table and Adeline's
behaviour to the Sea Lady and to Mrs. Bunting was as pleasant and alert
as any highly earnest and intellectual young lady's could be. And all
that Mrs. Bunting said and did tended with what people call infinite
tact--which really, you know, means a great deal more tact than is
comfortable--to develop and expose the more serious aspect of the Sea
Lady's mind. Mr. Bunting was unusually talkative and told them all about
a glorious project he had just heard of, to cut out the rather shrubby
and weedy front of the Leas and stick in something between a wine vault
and the Crystal Palace as a Winter Garden--which seemed to him a very
excellent idea indeed.
II
It is time now to give some impression of the imminent Chatteris, who
for all his late appearance is really the chief human being in my cousin
Melville's story. It happens that I met him with some frequency in my
university days and afterwards ever and again I came upon him. He was
rather a brilliant man at the university, smart without being vulgar and
clever for all that. He was remarkably good-looking from the very onset
of his manhood and without being in any way a showy spendthrift, was
quite magnificently extravagant. There was trouble in his last year,
something hushed up about a girl or woman in London, but his family had
it all over with him, and his uncle, the Earl of Beechcroft, settled
some of his bills. Not all--for the family is commendably free from
sentimental excesses--but enough to make him comfortable again. The
family is not a rich one and it further abounds in an extraordinary
quantity of rather frowsy, loose-tongued aunts--I never knew a family
quite so rich in old aunts. But Chatteris was so good-looking,
easy-mannered, and clever, that they seemed to agree almost without
discussion to pull him through. They hunted about for something that
would be really remunerative without being laborious or too commercial;
and meanwhile--after the extraordinary craving of his aunt, Lady
Poynting Mallow, to see him acting had been overcome by the united
efforts of the more religious section of his aunts--Chatteris set
himself seriously to the higher journalism--that is to say, the
journalism that dines anywhere, gets political tips after dinner, and is
always acceptable--if only to avoid thirteen articles--in a half-crown
review. In addition, he wrote some very passable verse and edited Jane
Austen for the only publisher who had not already reprinted the works of
that classic lady.
His verse, like himself, was shapely and handsome, and, like his
face, it suggested to the penetrating eye certain reservations and
indecisions. There was just that touch of refinement that is weakness
in the public man. But as yet he was not a public man; he was known to
be energetic and his work was gathering attention as always capable and
occasionally brilliant. His aunts declared he was ripening, that any
defect in vigour he displayed was the incompleteness of the process,
and decided he should go to America, where vigour and vigorous
opportunities abound, and there, I gather, he came upon something like
a failure. Something happened, indeed, quite a lot happened. He came
back unmarried--and _viâ_ the South Seas, Australasia and India. And
Lady Poynting Mallow publicly told him he was a fool, when he got back.
What happened in America, even if one does not consult contemporary
American papers, is still very difficult to determine. There appear to
have been the daughter of a millionaire and something like an engagement
in the story. According to the _New York Yell_, one of the smartest,
crispest, and altogether most representative papers in America, there
was also the daughter of some one else, whom the _Yell_ interviewed, or
professed to interview, under the heading:
AN ARISTOCRATIC BRITISHER
TRIFLES WITH
A PURE AMERICAN GIRL
INTERVIEW WITH THE VICTIM
OF HIS
HEARTLESS LEVITY
But this some one else was, I am inclined to think in spite of her
excellently executed portrait, merely a brilliant stroke of modern
journalism, the _Yell_ having got wind of the sudden retreat of
Chatteris and inventing a reason in preference to discovering one.
Wensleydale tells me the true impetus to bolt was the merest trifle. The
daughter of the millionaire, being a bright and spirited girl, had
undergone interviewing on the subject of her approaching marriage, on
marriage in general, on social questions of various sorts, and on the
relations of the British and American peoples, and he seems to have
found the thing in his morning paper. It took him suddenly and he lost
his head. And once he started, he seems to have lacked the power of mind
to turn about and come back. The affair was a mess, the family paid some
more of his bills and shirked others, and Chatteris turned up in London
again after a time, with somewhat diminished glory and a series of
letters on Imperial Affairs, each headed with the quotation: "What do
they know of England who only England know?"
Of course people of England learnt nothing of the real circumstances of
the case, but it was fairly obvious that he had gone to America and come
back empty-handed.
And that was how, in the course of some years, he came to Adeline
Glendower, of whose special gifts as his helper and inspiration you have
already heard from Mrs. Bunting. When he became engaged to her, the
family, which had long craved to forgive him--Lady Poynting Mallow as a
matter of fact had done so--brightened wonderfully. And after
considerable obscure activities he declared himself a philanthropic
Liberal with open spaces in his platform, and in a position, and ready
as a beginning, to try the quality of the conservative South.
He was away making certain decisive arrangements, in Paris and
elsewhere, at the time of the landing of the Sea Lady. Before the matter
was finally settled it was necessary that something should be said to a
certain great public character, and then he was to return and tell
Adeline. And every one was expecting him daily, including, it is now
indisputable, the Sea Lady.
III
The meeting of Miss Glendower and her affianced lover on his return from
Paris was one of those scenes in this story for which I have scarcely an
inkling of the true details. He came to Folkestone and stopped at the
Métropole, the Bunting house being full and the Métropole being the
nearest hotel to Sandgate; and he walked down in the afternoon and
asked for Adeline, which was pretty rather than correct. I gather that
they met in the drawing-room, and as Chatteris closed the door behind
him, I imagine there was something in the nature of a caress.
I must confess I envy the freedom of the novelist who can take you
behind such a locked door as this and give you all that such persons
say and do. But with the strongest will in the world to blend the
little scraps of fact I have into a continuous sequence of events, I
falter at this occasion. After all, I never saw Adeline at all until
after all these things were over, and what is she now? A rather tall, a
rather restless and active woman, very keen and obvious in public
affairs--with something gone out of her. Melville once saw a gleam of
that, but for the most part Melville never liked her; she had a wider
grasp of things than he, and he was a little afraid of her; she was in
some inexplicable way neither a pretty woman nor a "dear lady" nor a
_grande dame_ nor totally insignificant, and a heretic therefore in
Melville's scheme of things. He gives me small material for that
earlier Adeline. "She posed," he says; she was "political," and she was
always reading Mrs. Humphry Ward.
The last Melville regarded as the most heinous offence. It is not the
least of my cousin's weaknesses that he regards this great novelist as
an extremely corrupting influence for intelligent girls. She makes
them good and serious in the wrong way, he says. Adeline, he asserts,
was absolutely built on her. She was always attempting to be the
incarnation of _Marcella_. It was he who had perverted Mrs. Bunting's
mind to adopt this fancy. But I don't believe for a moment in this
idea of girls building themselves on heroines in fiction. These are
matters of elective affinity, and unless some bullying critic or
preacher sends us astray, we take each to our own novelist as the
souls in the Swedenborgian system take to their hells. Adeline took to
the imaginary _Marcella_. There was, Melville says, the strongest
likeness in their mental atmosphere. They had the same defects, a bias
for superiority--to use his expressive phrase--the same disposition
towards arrogant benevolence, that same obtuseness to little shades of
feeling that leads people to speak habitually of the "Lower Classes,"
and to think in the vein of that phrase. They certainly had the same
virtues, a conscious and conscientious integrity, a hard nobility
without one touch of magic, an industrious thoroughness. More than in
anything else, Adeline delighted in her novelist's thoroughness, her
freedom from impressionism, the patient resolution with which she
went into the corners and swept under the mat of every incident. And
it would be easy to argue from that, that Adeline behaved as Mrs.
Ward's most characteristic heroine behaved, on an analogous occasion.
_Marcella_ we know--at least after her heart was changed--would have
clung to him. There would have been a moment of high emotion in which
thoughts--of the highest class--mingled with the natural ambition of two
people in the prime of life and power. Then she would have receded with
a quick movement and listened with her beautiful hand pensive against
her cheek, while Chatteris began to sum up the forces against him--to
speculate on the action of this group and that. Something infinitely
tender and maternal would have spoken in her, pledging her to the utmost
help that love and a woman can give. She would have produced in
Chatteris that exquisite mingled impression of grace, passion,
self-yielding, which in all its infinite variations and repetitions made
up for him the constant poem of her beauty.
But that is the dream and not the reality. So Adeline might have dreamt
of behaving, but--she was not _Marcella_, and only wanting to be, and
he was not only not Maxwell but he had no intention of being Maxwell
anyhow. If he had had an opportunity of becoming Maxwell he would
probably have rejected it with extreme incivility. So they met like two
unheroic human beings, with shy and clumsy movements and, I suppose,
fairly honest eyes. Something there was in the nature of a caress, I
believe, and then I incline to fancy she said "Well?" and I think
he must have answered, "It's all right." After that, and rather
allusively, with a backward jerk of the head at intervals as it were
towards the great personage, Chatteris must have told her particulars.
He must have told her that he was going to contest Hythe and that the
little difficulty with the Glasgow commission agent who wanted to run
the Radical ticket as a "Man of Kent" had been settled without injury
to the party (such as it is). Assuredly they talked politics, because
soon after, when they came into the garden side by side to where Mrs.
Bunting and the Sea Lady sat watching the girls play croquet, Adeline
was in full possession of all these facts. I fancy that for such a
couple as they were, such intimation of success, such earnest topics,
replaced, to a certain extent at any rate, the vain repetition of
vulgar endearments.
The Sea Lady appears to have been the first to see them. "Here he is,"
she said abruptly.
"Whom?" said Mrs. Bunting, glancing up at eyes that were suddenly eager,
and then following their glance towards Chatteris.
"Your other son," said the Sea Lady, jesting unheeded.
"It's Harry and Adeline!" cried Mrs. Bunting. "Don't they make a
handsome couple?"
But the Sea Lady made no reply, and leaned back, scrutinising their
advance. Certainly they made a handsome pair. Coming out of the veranda
into the blaze of the sun and across the trim lawn towards the shadow of
the ilex trees, they were lit, as it were, with a more glorious
limelight, and displayed like actors on a stage more spacious than the
stage of any theatre. The figure of Chatteris must have come out tall
and fair and broad, a little sunburnt, and I gather even then a little
preoccupied, as indeed he always seemed to be in those latter days. And
beside him Adeline, glancing now up at him and now towards the audience
under the trees, dark and a little flushed, rather tall--though not so
tall as _Marcella_ seems to have been--and, you know, without any
instructions from any novel-writer in the world, glad.
Chatteris did not discover that there was any one but Buntings under the
tree until he was close at hand. Then the abrupt discovery of this
stranger seems to have checked whatever he was prepared to say for his
_début_, and Adeline took the centre of the stage. Mrs. Bunting was
standing up, and all the croquet players--except Mabel, who was
winning--converged on Chatteris with cries of welcome. Mabel remained in
the midst of what I understand is called a tea-party, loudly demanding
that they should see her "play it out." No doubt if everything had gone
well she would have given a most edifying exhibition of what croquet can
sometimes be.
Adeline swam forward to Mrs. Bunting and cried with a note of triumph in
her voice: "It is all settled. Everything is settled. He has won them
all and he is to contest Hythe."
Quite involuntarily her eyes must have met the Sea Lady's.
It is of course quite impossible to say what she found there--or indeed
what there was to find there then. For a moment they faced riddles, and
then the Sea Lady turned her eyes with a long deferred scrutiny to the
man's face, which she probably saw now closely for the first time. One
wonders whether it is just possible that there may have been something,
if it were no more than a gleam of surprise and enquiry, in that meeting
of their eyes. Just for a moment she held his regard, and then it
shifted enquiringly to Mrs. Bunting.
That lady intervened effusively with an "Oh! I forgot," and introduced
them. I think they went through that without another meeting of the
foils of their regard.
"You back?" said Fred to Chatteris, touching his arm, and Chatteris
confirmed this happy guess.
The Bunting girls seemed to welcome Adeline's enviable situation rather
than Chatteris as an individual. And Mabel's voice could be heard
approaching. "Oughtn't they to see me play it out, Mr. Chatteris?"
"Hullo, Harry, my boy!" cried Mr. Bunting, who was cultivating a bluff
manner. "How's Paris?"
"How's the fishing?" said Harry.
And so they came into a vague circle about this lively person who had
"won them all"--except Parker, of course, who remained in her own
proper place and was, I am certain, never to be won by anybody.
There was a handing and shifting of garden chairs.
No one seemed to take the slightest notice of Adeline's dramatic
announcement. The Buntings were not good at thinking of things to say.
She stood in the midst of the group like a leading lady when the other
actors have forgotten their parts. Then every one woke up to this, as it
were, and they went off in a volley. "So it's really all settled," said
Mrs. Bunting; and Betty Bunting said, "There _is_ to be an election
then!" and Nettie said, "What fun!" Mr. Bunting remarked with a knowing
air, "So you saw him then?" and Fred flung "Hooray!" into the tangle of
sounds.
The Sea Lady of course said nothing.
"We'll give 'em a jolly good fight for it, anyhow," said Mr. Bunting.
"Well, I hope we shall do that," said Chatteris.
"We shall do more than that," said Adeline.
"Oh, yes!" said Betty Bunting, "we shall."
"I knew they would let him," said Adeline.
"If they had any sense," said Mr. Bunting.
Then came a pause, and Mr. Bunting was emboldened to lift up his voice
and utter politics. "They are getting sense," he said. "They are
learning that a party must have men, men of birth and training. Money
and the mob--they've tried to keep things going by playing to fads and
class jealousies. And the Irish. And they've had their lesson. How?
Why,--we've stood aside. We've left 'em to faddists and fomenters--and
the Irish. And here they are! It's a revolution in the party. We've let
it down. Now we must pick it up again."
He made a gesture with his fat little hand, one of those fat pink little
hands that appear to have neither flesh nor bones inside them but only
sawdust or horse-hair. Mrs. Bunting leaned back in her chair and smiled
at him indulgently.
"It is no common election," said Mr. Bunting. "It is a great issue."
The Sea Lady had been regarding him thoughtfully. "What is a great
issue?" she asked. "I don't quite understand."
Mr. Bunting spread himself to explain to her. "This," he said to begin
with. Adeline listened with a mingling of interest and impatience,
attempting ever and again to suppress him and to involve Chatteris by a
tactful interposition. But Chatteris appeared disinclined to be
involved. He seemed indeed quite interested in Mr. Bunting's view of the
case.
Presently the croquet quartette went back--at Mabel's suggestion--to
their game, and the others continued their political talk. It became
more personal at last, dealing soon quite specifically with all that
Chatteris was doing and more particularly all that Chatteris was to do.
Mrs. Bunting suddenly suppressed Mr. Bunting as he was offering advice,
and Adeline took the burden of the talk again. She indicated vast
purposes. "This election is merely the opening of a door," she said.
When Chatteris made modest disavowals she smiled with a proud and happy
consciousness of what she meant to make of him.
And Mrs. Bunting supplied footnotes to make it all clear to the Sea
Lady. "He's so modest," she said at one point, and Chatteris pretended
not to hear and went rather pink. Ever and again he attempted to deflect
the talk towards the Sea Lady and away from himself, but he was
hampered by his ignorance of her position.
And the Sea Lady said scarcely anything but watched Chatteris and
Adeline, and more particularly Chatteris in relation to Adeline.
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
SYMPTOMATIC
I
My cousin Melville is never very clear about his dates. Now this is
greatly to be regretted, because it would be very illuminating indeed if
one could tell just how many days elapsed before he came upon Chatteris
in intimate conversation with the Sea Lady. He was going along the front
of the Leas with some books from the Public Library that Miss Glendower
had suddenly wished to consult, and which she, with that entire
ignorance of his lack of admiration for her which was part of her want
of charm for him, had bidden him bring her. It was in one of those
sheltered paths just under the brow which give such a pleasant and
characteristic charm to Folkestone, that he came upon a little group
about the Sea Lady's bath chair. Chatteris was seated in one of the
wooden seats that are embedded in the bank, and was leaning forward and
looking into the Sea Lady's face; and she was speaking with a smile that
struck Melville even at the time as being a little special in its
quality--and she seems to have been capable of many charming smiles.
Parker was a little distance away, where a sort of bastion projects and
gives a wide view of the pier and harbour and the coast of France,
regarding it all with a qualified disfavour, and the bath chairman was
crumpled up against the bank lost in that wistful melancholy that the
constant perambulation of broken humanity necessarily engenders.
[Illustration: A little group about the Sea Lady's bath chair.]
My cousin slackened his pace a little and came up and joined them.
The conversation hung at his approach. Chatteris sat back a little, but
there seemed no resentment and he sought a topic for the three to
discuss in the books Melville carried.
"Books?" he said.
"For Miss Glendower," said Melville.
"Oh!" said Chatteris.
"What are they about?" asked the Sea Lady.
"Land tenure," said Melville.
"That's hardly my subject," said the Sea Lady, and Chatteris joined in
her smile as if he saw a jest.
There was a little pause.
"You are contesting Hythe?" said Melville.
"Fate points that way," said Chatteris.
"They threaten a dissolution for September."
"It will come in a month," said Chatteris, with the inimitable tone of
one who knows.
"In that case we shall soon be busy."
"And _I_ may canvass," said the Sea Lady. "I never have----"
"Miss Waters," explained Chatteris, "has been telling me she means to
help us." He met Melville's eye frankly.
"It's rough work, Miss Waters," said Melville.
"I don't mind that. It's fun. And I want to help. I really do want to
help--Mr. Chatteris."
"You know, that's encouraging."
"I could go around with you in my bath chair?"
"It would be a picnic," said Chatteris.
"I mean to help anyhow," said the Sea Lady.
"You know the case for the plaintiff?" asked Melville.
She looked at him.
"You've got your arguments?"
"I shall ask them to vote for Mr. Chatteris, and afterwards when I see
them I shall remember them and smile and wave my hand. What else is
there?"
"Nothing," said Chatteris, and shut the lid on Melville. "I wish I had
an argument as good."
"What sort of people are they here?" asked Melville. "Isn't there a
smuggling interest to conciliate?"
"I haven't asked that," said Chatteris. "Smuggling is over and past,
you know. Forty years ago. It always has been forty years ago. They
trotted out the last of the smugglers,--interesting old man, full of
reminiscences,--when there was a count of the Saxon Shore. He remembered
smuggling--forty years ago. Really, I doubt if there ever was any
smuggling. The existing coast guard is a sacrifice to a vain
superstition."
"Why!" cried the Sea Lady. "Only about five weeks ago I saw quite near
here----"
She stopped abruptly and caught Melville's eye. He grasped her
difficulty.
"In a paper?" he suggested.
"Yes, in a paper," she said, seizing the rope he threw her.
"Well?" asked Chatteris.
"There is smuggling still," said the Sea Lady, with an air of some one
who decides not to tell an anecdote that is suddenly found to be half
forgotten.
"There's no doubt it happens," said Chatteris, missing it all. "But it
doesn't appear in the electioneering. I certainly sha'n't agitate for a
faster revenue cutter. However things may be in that respect, I take the
line that they are very well as they are. That's my line, of course."
And he looked out to sea. The eyes of Melville and the Sea Lady had an
intimate moment.
"There, you know, is just a specimen of the sort of thing we do," said
Chatteris. "Are you prepared to be as intricate as that?"
"Quite," said the Sea Lady.
My cousin was reminded of an anecdote.
The talk degenerated into anecdotes of canvassing, and ran shallow. My
cousin was just gathering that Mrs. Bunting and Miss Bunting had been
with the Sea Lady and had gone into the town to a shop, when they
returned. Chatteris rose to greet them and explained--what had been by
no means apparent before--that he was on his way to Adeline, and after a
few further trivialities he and Melville went on together.
A brief silence fell between them.
"Who is that Miss Waters?" asked Chatteris.
"Friend of Mrs. Bunting," prevaricated Melville.
"So I gather.... She seems a very charming person."
"She is."
"She's interesting. Her illness seems to throw her up. It makes a
passive thing of her, like a picture or something that's--imaginary.
Imagined--anyhow. She sits there and smiles and responds. Her eyes--have
something intimate. And yet----"
My cousin offered no assistance.
"Where did Mrs. Bunting find her."
My cousin had to gather himself together for a second or so.
"There's something," he said deliberately, "that Mrs. Bunting doesn't
seem disposed----"
"What can it be?"
"It's bound to be all right," said Melville rather weakly.
"It's strange, too. Mrs. Bunting is usually so disposed----"
Melville left that to itself.
"That's what one feels," said Chatteris.
"What?"
"Mystery."
My cousin shares with me a profound detestation of that high mystic
method of treating women. He likes women to be finite--and nice. In
fact, he likes everything to be finite--and nice. So he merely grunted.
But Chatteris was not to be stopped by that. He passed to a critical
note. "No doubt it's all illusion. All women are impressionists, a
patch, a light. You get an effect. And that is all you are meant to get,
I suppose. She gets an effect. But how--that's the mystery. It's not
merely beauty. There's plenty of beauty in the world. But not of these
effects. The eyes, I fancy."
He dwelt on that for a moment.
"There's really nothing in eyes, you know, Chatteris," said my cousin
Melville, borrowing an alien argument and a tone of analytical cynicism
from me. "Have you ever looked at eyes through a hole in a sheet?"
"Oh, I don't know," said Chatteris. "I don't mean the mere physical
eye.... Perhaps it's the look of health--and the bath chair. A bold
discord. You don't know what's the matter, Melville?"
"How?"
"I gather from Bunting it's a disablement--not a deformity."
"He ought to know."
"I'm not so sure of that. You don't happen to know the nature of her
disablement?"
"I can't tell at all," said Melville in a speculative tone. It struck
him he was getting to prevaricate better.
The subject seemed exhausted. They spoke of a common friend whom the
sight of the Métropole suggested. Then they did not talk at all for a
time, until the stir and interest of the band stand was passed. Then
Chatteris threw out a thought.
"Complex business--feminine motives," he remarked.
"How?"
"This canvassing. _She_ can't be interested in philanthropic Liberalism."
"There's a difference in the type. And besides, it's a personal matter."
"Not necessarily, is it? Surely there's not such an intellectual gap
between the sexes! If _you_ can get interested----"
"Oh, I know."
"Besides, it's not a question of principles. It's the fun of
electioneering."
"Fun!"
"There's no knowing what won't interest the feminine mind," said
Melville, and added, "or what will."
Chatteris did not answer.
"It's the district visiting instinct, I suppose," said Melville. "They
all have it. It's the canvassing. All women like to go into houses that
don't belong to them."
"Very likely," said Chatteris shortly, and failing a reply from
Melville, he gave way to secret meditations, it would seem still of a
fairly agreeable sort.
The twelve o'clock gun thudded from Shornecliffe Camp.
"By Jove!" said Chatteris, and quickened his steps.
* * * * *
They found Adeline busy amidst her papers. As they entered she pointed
reproachfully, yet with the protrusion of a certain Marcella-like
undertone of sweetness, at the clock. The apologies of Chatteris were
effusive and winning, and involved no mention of the Sea Lady on the
Leas.
Melville delivered his books and left them already wading deeply into
the details of the district organisation that the local Liberal
organiser had submitted.
II
A little while after the return of Chatteris, my cousin Melville
and the Sea Lady were under the ilex at the end of the sea garden
and--disregarding Parker (as every one was accustomed to do), who was
in a garden chair doing some afternoon work at a proper distance--there
was nobody with them at all. Fred and the girls were out cycling--Fred
had gone with them at the Sea Lady's request--and Miss Glendower and
Mrs. Bunting were at Hythe calling diplomatically on some rather horrid
local people who might be serviceable to Harry in his electioneering.
Mr. Bunting was out fishing. He was not fond of fishing, but he was in
many respects an exceptionally resolute little man, and he had taken to
fishing every day in the afternoon after luncheon in order to break
himself of what Mrs. Bunting called his "ridiculous habit" of getting
sea-sick whenever he went out in a boat. He said that if fishing from a
boat with pieces of mussels for bait after luncheon would not break the
habit nothing would, and certainly it seemed at times as if it were
going to break everything that was in him. But the habit escaped. This,
however, is a digression.
These two, I say, were sitting in the ample shade under the evergreen
oak, and Melville, I imagine, was in those fine faintly patterned
flannels that in the year 1899 combined correctness with ease. He was no
doubt looking at the shaded face of the Sea Lady, framed in a frame of
sunlit yellow-green lawn and black-green ilex leaves--at least so my
impulse for verisimilitude conceives it--and she at first was pensive
and downcast that afternoon and afterwards she was interested and looked
into his eyes. Either she must have suggested that he might smoke or
else he asked. Anyhow, his cigarettes were produced. She looked at them
with an arrested gesture, and he hung for a moment, doubtful, on her
gesture.
"I suppose _you_--" he said.
"I never learned."
He glanced at Parker and then met the Sea Lady's regard.
"It's one of the things I came for," she said.
He took the only course.
She accepted a cigarette and examined it thoughtfully. "Down there," she
said, "it's just one of the things-- You will understand we get nothing
but saturated tobacco. Some of the mermen-- There's something they have
picked up from the sailors. Quids, I think they call it. But that's too
horrid for words!"
She dismissed the unpleasant topic by a movement, and lapsed into
thought.
My cousin clicked his match-box.
She had a momentary doubt and glanced towards the house. "Mrs. Bunting?"
she asked. Several times, I understand, she asked the same thing.
"She wouldn't mind--" said Melville, and stopped.
"She won't think it improper," he amplified, "if nobody else thinks it
improper."
"There's nobody else," said the Sea Lady, glancing at Parker, and my
cousin lit the match.
My cousin has an indirect habit of mind. With all general and all
personal things his desperation to get at them obliquely amounts almost
to a passion; he could no more go straight to a crisis than a cat could
to a stranger. He came off at a tangent now as he was sitting forward
and scrutinising her first very creditable efforts to draw. "I just
wonder," he said, "exactly what it was you _did_ come for."
She smiled at him over a little jet of smoke. "Why, this," she said.
"And hairdressing?"
"And dressing."
She smiled again after a momentary hesitation. "And all this sort of
thing," she said, as if she felt she had answered him perhaps a little
below his deserts. Her gesture indicated the house and the lawn and--my
cousin Melville wondered just exactly how much else.
"Am I doing it right?" asked the Sea Lady.
"Beautifully," said my cousin with a faint sigh in his voice. "What do
you think of it?"
"It was worth coming for," said the Sea Lady, smiling into his eyes.
"But did you really just come----?"
She filled in his gap. "To see what life was like on land here?... Isn't
that enough?"
Melville's cigarette had failed to light. He regarded its blighted
career pensively.
"Life," he said, "isn't all--this sort of thing."
"This sort of thing?"
"Sunlight. Cigarette smoking. Talk. Looking nice."
"But it's made up----"
"Not altogether."
"For example?"
"Oh, _you_ know."
"What?"
"You know," said Melville, and would not look at her.
"I decline to know," she said after a little pause.
"Besides--" he said.
"Yes?"
"You told Mrs. Bunting--" It occurred to him that he was telling tales,
but that scruple came too late.
"Well?"
"Something about a soul."
She made no immediate answer. He looked up and her eyes were smiling.
"Mr. Melville," she said, innocently, "what _is_ a soul?"
"Well," said my cousin readily, and then paused for a space. "A soul,"
said he, and knocked an imaginary ash from his extinct cigarette.
"A soul," he repeated, and glanced at Parker.
"A soul, you know," he said again, and looked at the Sea Lady with the
air of a man who is handling a difficult matter with skilful care.
"Come to think of it," he said, "it's a rather complicated matter to
explain----"
"To a being without one?"
"To any one," said my cousin Melville, suddenly admitting his
difficulty.
He meditated upon her eyes for a moment.
"Besides," he said, "you know what a soul is perfectly well."
"No," she answered, "I don't."
"You know as well as I do."
"Ah! that may be different."
"You came to get a soul."
"Perhaps I don't want one. Why--if one hasn't one----?"
"Ah, _there_!" And my cousin shrugged his shoulders. "But really you
know-- It's just the generality of it that makes it hard to define."
"Everybody has a soul?"
"Every one."
"Except me?"
"I'm not certain of that."
"Mrs. Bunting?"
"Certainly."
"And Mr. Bunting?"
"Every one."
"Has Miss Glendower?"
"Lots."
The Sea Lady mused. She went off at a tangent abruptly.
"Mr. Melville," she said, "what is a union of souls?"
Melville flicked his extinct cigarette suddenly into an elbow shape and
then threw it away. The phrase may have awakened some reminiscence.
"It's an extra," he said. "It's a sort of flourish.... And sometimes
it's like leaving cards by footmen--a substitute for the real presence."
There came a gap. He remained downcast, trying to find a way towards
whatever it was that was in his mind to say. Conceivably, he did not
clearly know what that might be until he came to it. The Sea Lady
abandoned an attempt to understand him in favour of a more urgent topic.
"Do you think Miss Glendower and Mr. Chatteris----?"
Melville looked up at her. He noticed she had hung on the latter name.
"Decidedly," he said. "It's just what they _would_ do."
Then he spoke again. "Chatteris?" he said.
"Yes," said she.
"I thought so," said Melville.
The Sea Lady regarded him gravely. They scrutinised each other with an
unprecedented intimacy. Melville was suddenly direct. It was a discovery
that it seemed he ought to have made all along. He felt quite
unaccountably bitter; he spoke with a twitch of the mouth and his voice
had a note of accusation. "You want to talk about him."
She nodded--still grave.
"Well, _I_ don't." He changed his note. "But I will if you wish it."
"I thought you would."
"Oh, _you_ know," said Melville, discovering his extinct cigarette was
within reach of a vindictive heel.
She said nothing.
"Well?" said Melville.
"I saw him first," she apologised, "some years ago."
"Where?"
"In the South Seas--near Tonga."
"And that is really what you came for?"
This time her manner was convincing. She admitted, "Yes."
Melville was carefully impartial. "He's sightly," he admitted, "and
well-built and a decent chap--a decent chap. But I don't see why
you----"
He went off at a tangent. "He didn't see you----?"
"Oh, no."
Melville's pose and tone suggested a mind of extreme liberality. "I
don't see why you came," he said. "Nor what you mean to do. You
see"--with an air of noting a trifling but valid obstacle--"there's Miss
Glendower."
"Is there?" she said.
"Well, isn't there?"
"That's just it," she said.
"And besides after all, you know, why should you----?"
"I admit it's unreasonable," she said. "But why reason about it? It's a
matter of the imagination----"
"For him?"
"How should I know how it takes him? That is what I _want_ to know."
Melville looked her in the eyes again. "You know, you're not playing
fair," he said.
"To her?"
"To any one."
"Why?"
"Because you are immortal--and unincumbered. Because you can do
everything you want to do--and we cannot. I don't know why we cannot,
but we cannot. Here we are, with our short lives and our little souls to
save, or lose, fussing for our little concerns. And you, out of the
elements, come and beckon----"
"The elements have their rights," she said. And then: "The elements are
the elements, you know. That is what you forget."
"Imagination?"
"Certainly. That's _the_ element. Those elements of your chemists----"
"Yes?"
"Are all imagination. There isn't any other." She went on: "And all the
elements of your life, the life you imagine you are living, the little
things you must do, the little cares, the extraordinary little duties,
the day by day, the hypnotic limitations--all these things are a fancy
that has taken hold of you too strongly for you to shake off. You
daren't, you mustn't, you can't. To us who watch you----"
"You watch us?"
"Oh, yes. We watch you, and sometimes we envy you. Not only for the dry
air and the sunlight, and the shadows of trees, and the feeling of
morning, and the pleasantness of many such things, but because your
lives begin and end--because you look towards an end."
She reverted to her former topic. "But you are so limited, so tied! The
little time you have, you use so poorly. You begin and you end, and all
the time between it is as if you were enchanted; you are afraid to do
this that would be delightful to do, you must do that, though you know
all the time it is stupid and disagreeable. Just think of the
things--even the little things--you mustn't do. Up there on the Leas in
this hot weather all the people are sitting in stuffy ugly clothes--ever
so much too much clothes, hot tight boots, you know, when they have the
most lovely pink feet, some of them--we _see_,--and they are all with
little to talk about and nothing to look at, and bound not to do all
sorts of natural things and bound to do all sorts of preposterous
things. Why are they bound? Why are they letting life slip by them?
Just as if they wouldn't all of them presently be dead! Suppose you were
to go up there in a bathing dress and a white cotton hat----"
"It wouldn't be proper!" cried Melville.
"Why not?"
"It would be outrageous!"
"But any one may see you like that on the beach!"
"That's different."
"It isn't different. You dream it's different. And in just the same way
you dream all the other things are proper or improper or good or bad to
do. Because you are in a dream, a fantastic, unwholesome little dream.
So small, so infinitely small! I saw you the other day dreadfully
worried by a spot of ink on your sleeve--almost the whole afternoon."
[Illustration: "Why not?"]
My cousin looked distressed. She abandoned the ink-spot.
"Your life, I tell you, is a dream--a dream, and you can't wake out of
it----"
"And if so, why do you tell me?"
She made no answer for a space.
"Why do you tell me?" he insisted.
He heard the rustle of her movement as she bent towards him.
She came warmly close to him. She spoke in gently confidential
undertone, as one who imparts a secret that is not to be too lightly
given. "Because," she said, "there are better dreams."
III
For a moment it seemed to Melville that he had been addressed by
something quite other than the pleasant lady in the bath chair before
him. "But how--?" he began and stopped. He remained silent with a
perplexed face. She leaned back and glanced away from him, and when at
last she turned and spoke again, specific realities closed in on him
once more.
"Why shouldn't I," she asked, "if I want to?"
"Shouldn't what?"
"If I fancy Chatteris."
"One might think of obstacles," he reflected.
"He's not hers," she said.
"In a way, he's trying to be," said Melville.
"Trying to be! He has to be what he is. Nothing can make him hers. If
you weren't dreaming you would see that." My cousin was silent. "She's
not _real_," she went on. "She's a mass of fancies and vanities. She
gets everything out of books. She gets herself out of a book. You can
see her doing it here.... What is she seeking? What is she trying to
do? All this work, all this political stuff of hers? She talks of the
condition of the poor! What is the condition of the poor? A dreary
tossing on the bed of existence, a perpetual fear of consequences that
perpetually distresses them. Lives of anxiety they lead, because they do
not know what a dream the whole thing is. Suppose they were not anxious
and afraid.... And what does she care for the condition of the poor,
after all? It is only a point of departure in her dream. In her heart
she does not want their dreams to be happier, in her heart she has no
passion for them, only her dream is that she should be prominently doing
good, asserting herself, controlling their affairs amidst thanks and
praise and blessings. _Her_ dream! Of serious things!--a rout of
phantoms pursuing a phantom ignis fatuus--the afterglow of a mirage.
Vanity of vanities----"
"It's real enough to her."
"As real as she can make it, you know. But she isn't real herself. She
begins badly."
"And he, you know----"
"He doesn't believe in it."
"I'm not so sure."
"I am--now."
"He's a complicated being."
"He will ravel out," said the Sea Lady.
"I think you misjudge him about that work of his, anyhow," said
Melville. "He's a man rather divided against himself." He added
abruptly, "We all are." He recovered himself from the generality. "It's
vague, I admit, a sort of vague wish to do something decent, you know,
that he has----"
"A sort of vague wish," she conceded; "but----"
"He means well," said Melville, clinging to his proposition.
"He means nothing. Only very dimly he suspects----"
"Yes?"
"What you too are beginning to suspect.... That other things may be
conceivable even if they are not possible. That this life of yours is
not everything. That it is not to be taken too seriously. Because ...
there are better dreams!"
The song of the sirens was in her voice; my cousin would not look at her
face. "I know nothing of any other dreams," he said. "One has oneself
and this life, and that is enough to manage. What other dreams can there
be? Anyhow, we are in the dream--we have to accept it. Besides, you
know, that's going off the question. We were talking of Chatteris, and
why you have come for him. Why should you come, why should any one
outside come--into this world?"
"Because we are permitted to come--we immortals. And why, if we choose
to do so, and taste this life that passes and continues, as rain that
falls to the ground, why should we not do it? Why should we abstain?"
"And Chatteris?"
"If he pleases me."
He roused himself to a Titanic effort against an oppression that was
coming over him. He tried to get the thing down to a definite small
case, an incident, an affair of considerations. "But look here, you
know," he said. "What precisely do you mean to do if you get him? You
don't seriously intend to keep up the game to that extent. You don't
mean--positively, in our terrestrial fashion, you know--to marry him?"
The Sea Lady laughed at his recovery of the practical tone. "Well, why
not?" she asked.
"And go about in a bath chair, and-- No, that's not it. What _is_ it?"
He looked up into her eyes, and it was like looking into deep water.
Down in that deep there stirred impalpable things. She smiled at him.
"No!" she said, "I sha'n't marry him and go about in a bath chair. And
grow old as all earthly women must. (It's the dust, I think, and the
dryness of the air, and the way you begin and end.) You burn too fast,
you flare and sink and die. This life of yours!--the illnesses and the
growing old! When the skin wears shabby, and the light is out of the
hair, and the teeth-- Not even for love would I face it. No.... But
then you know--" Her voice sank to a low whisper. "_There are better
dreams._"
"What dreams?" rebelled Melville. "What do you mean? What are you? What
do you mean by coming into this life--you who pretend to be a woman--and
whispering, whispering ... to us who are in it, to us who have no
escape."
"But there is an escape," said the Sea Lady.
"How?"
"For some there is an escape. When the whole life rushes to a moment--"
And then she stopped. Now there is clearly no sense in this sentence to
my mind, even from a lady of an essentially imaginary sort, who comes
out of the sea. How can a whole life rush to a moment? But whatever it
was she really did say, there is no doubt she left it half unsaid.
He glanced up at her abrupt pause, and she was looking at the house.
* * * * *
"Do ... ris! Do ... ris! Are you there?" It was Mrs. Bunting's voice
floating athwart the lawn, the voice of the ascendant present, of
invincibly sensible things. The world grew real again to Melville. He
seemed to wake up, to start back from some delusive trance that crept
upon him.
He looked at the Sea Lady as if he were already incredulous of the
things they had said, as if he had been asleep and dreamed the talk.
Some light seemed to go out, some fancy faded. His eye rested upon the
inscription, "Flamps, Bath Chair Proprietor," just visible under her
arm.
"We've got perhaps a little more serious than--" he said doubtfully, and
then, "What you have been saying--did you exactly mean----?"
The rustle of Mrs. Bunting's advance became audible, and Parker moved
and coughed.
He was quite sure they had been "more serious than----"
"Another time perhaps----"
Had all these things really been said, or was he under some fantastic
hallucination?
He had a sudden thought. "Where's your cigarette?" he asked.
But her cigarette had ended long ago.
"And what have you been talking about so long?" sang Mrs. Bunting, with
an almost motherly hand on the back of Melville's chair.
"Oh!" said Melville, at a loss for once, and suddenly rising from his
chair to face her, and then to the Sea Lady with an artificially easy
smile, "What _have_ we been talking about?"
"All sorts of things, I dare say," said Mrs. Bunting, in what might
almost be called an arch manner. And she honoured Melville with a
special smile--one of those smiles that are morally almost winks.
[Illustration: The waiter retires amazed.]
My cousin caught all the archness full in the face, and for four seconds
he stared at Mrs. Bunting in amazement. He wanted breath. Then they
all laughed together, and Mrs. Bunting sat down pleasantly and remarked,
quite audibly to herself, "As if I couldn't guess."
IV
I gather that after this talk Melville fell into an extraordinary net of
doubting. In the first place, and what was most distressing, he doubted
whether this conversation could possibly have happened at all, and if it
had whether his memory had not played him some trick in modifying and
intensifying the import of it all. My cousin occasionally dreams
conversations of so sober and probable a sort as to mingle quite
perplexingly with his real experiences. Was this one of these occasions?
He found himself taking up and scrutinising, as it were, first this
remembered sentence and then that. Had she really said this thing and
quite in this way? His memory of their conversation was never quite the
same for two days together. Had she really and deliberately foreshadowed
for Chatteris some obscure and mystical submergence?
What intensified and complicated his doubts most, was the Sea Lady's
subsequent serene freedom from allusion to anything that might or might
not have passed. She behaved just as she had always behaved; neither an
added intimacy nor that distance that follows indiscreet confidences
appeared in her manner.
And amidst this crop of questions arose presently quite a new set of
doubts, as if he were not already sufficiently equipped. The Sea Lady
alleged she had come to the world that lives on land, for Chatteris.
And then----?
He had not hitherto looked ahead to see precisely what would happen to
Chatteris, to Miss Glendower, to the Buntings or any one when, as seemed
highly probable, Chatteris was "got." There were other dreams, there was
another existence, an elsewhere--and Chatteris was to go there! So she
said! But it came into Melville's mind with a quite disproportionate
force and vividness that once, long ago, he had seen a picture of a man
and a mermaid, rushing downward through deep water.... Could it possibly
be that sort of thing in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-nine?
Conceivably, if she had said these things, did she mean them, and if she
meant them, and this definite campaign of capture was in hand, what was
an orderly, sane-living, well-dressed bachelor of the world to do?
Look on--until things ended in a catastrophe?
One figures his face almost aged. He appears to have hovered about the
house on the Sandgate Riviera to a scandalous extent, failing always to
get a sufficiently long and intimate tête-à-tête with the Sea Lady to
settle once for all his doubts as to what really had been said and what
he had dreamed or fancied in their talk. Never had he been so
exceedingly disturbed as he was by the twist this talk had taken. Never
had his habitual pose of humorous acquiescence in life been quite so
difficult to keep up. He became positively absent-minded. "You know if
it's like that, it's serious," was the burden of his private mutterings.
His condition was palpable even to Mrs. Bunting. But she misunderstood
his nature. She said something. Finally, and quite abruptly, he set off
to London in a state of frantic determination to get out of it all. The
Sea Lady wished him good-bye in Mrs. Bunting's presence as if there had
never been anything unusual between them.
I suppose one may contrive to understand something of his disturbance.
He had made quite considerable sacrifices to the world. He had, at great
pains, found his place and his way in it, he had imagined he had really
"got the hang of it," as people say, and was having an interesting time.
And then, you know, to encounter a voice, that subsequently insists upon
haunting you with "_There are better dreams_"; to hear a tale that
threatens complications, disasters, broken hearts, and not to have the
faintest idea of the proper thing to do.
But I do not think he would have bolted from Sandgate until he had
really got some more definite answer to the question, "_What_ better
dreams?" until he had surprised or forced some clearer illumination from
the passive invalid, if Mrs. Bunting one morning had not very tactfully
dropped a hint.
You know Mrs. Bunting, and you can imagine what she tactfully hinted.
Just at that time, what with her own girls and the Glendower girls, her
imagination was positively inflamed for matrimony; she was a matrimonial
fanatic; she would have married anybody to anything just for the fun of
doing it, and the idea of pairing off poor Melville to this mysterious
immortal with a scaly tail seems to have appeared to her the most
natural thing in the world.
_Apropos_ of nothing whatever I fancy she remarked, "Your opportunity is
now, Mr. Melville."
"My opportunity!" cried Melville, trying madly not to understand in the
face of her pink resolution.
"You've a monopoly now," she cried. "But when we go back to London with
her there will be ever so many people running after her."
I fancy Melville said something about carrying the thing too far. He
doesn't remember what he did say. I don't think he even knew at the
time.
However, he fled back to London in August, and was there so miserably at
loose ends that he had not the will to get out of the place. On this
passage in the story he does not dwell, and such verisimilitude as may
be, must be supplied by my imagination. I imagine him in his charmingly
appointed flat,--a flat that is light without being trivial, and
artistic with no want of dignity or sincerity,--finding a loss of
interest in his books, a loss of beauty in the silver he (not too
vehemently) collects. I imagine him wandering into that dainty little
bed-room of his and around into the dressing-room, and there, rapt in a
blank contemplation of the seven-and-twenty pairs of trousers (all
creasing neatly in their proper stretchers) that are necessary to his
conception of a wise and happy man. For every occasion he has learnt, in
a natural easy progress to knowledge, the exquisitely appropriate pair
of trousers, the permissible upper garment, the becoming gesture and
word. He was a man who had mastered his world. And then, you know, the
whisper:--
"_There are better dreams._"
"What dreams?" I imagine him asking, with a defensive note. Whatever
transparence the world might have had, whatever suggestion of something
beyond there, in the sea garden at Sandgate, I fancy that in Melville's
apartments in London it was indisputably opaque.
And "Damn it!" he cried, "if these dreams are for Chatteris, why should
she tell me? Suppose I had the chance of them-- Whatever they are----"
He reflected, with a terrible sincerity in the nature of his will.
"No!" And then again, "No!
"And if one mustn't have 'em, why should one know about 'em and be
worried by them? If she comes to do mischief, why shouldn't she do
mischief without making me an accomplice?"
He walks up and down and stops at last and stares out of his window on
the jaded summer traffic going Haymarket way.
He sees nothing of that traffic. He sees the little sea garden at
Sandgate and that little group of people very small and bright and
something--something hanging over them. "It isn't fair on them--or
me--or anybody!"
Then you know, quite suddenly, I imagine him swearing.
I imagine him at his luncheon, a meal he usually treats with a becoming
gravity. I imagine the waiter marking the kindly self-indulgence of his
clean-shaven face, and advancing with that air of intimate participation
the good waiter shows to such as he esteems. I figure the respectful
pause, the respectful enquiry.
"Oh, anything!" cries Melville, and the waiter retires amazed.
V
To add to Melville's distress, as petty discomforts do add to all
genuine trouble, his club-house was undergoing an operation, and was
full of builders and decorators; they had gouged out its windows and
gagged its hall with scaffolding, and he and his like were guests of a
stranger club that had several members who blew. They seemed never to do
anything but blow and sigh and rustle papers and go to sleep about the
place; they were like blight-spots on the handsome plant of this
host-club, and it counted for little with Melville, in the state he was
in, that all the fidgety breathers were persons of eminent position. But
it was this temporary dislocation of his world that brought him
unexpectedly into a _quasi_ confidential talk with Chatteris one
afternoon, for Chatteris was one of the less eminent and amorphous
members of this club that was sheltering Melville's club.
[Illustration: They seemed never to do anything but blow and sigh and
rustle papers.]
Melville had taken up _Punch_--he was in that mood when a man takes up
anything--and was reading, he did not know exactly what. Presently he
sighed, looked up, and discovered Chatteris entering the room.
He was surprised to see Chatteris, startled and just faintly alarmed,
and Chatteris it was evident was surprised and disconcerted to see him.
Chatteris stood in as awkward an attitude as he was capable of, staring
unfavourably, and for a moment or so he gave no sign of recognition.
Then he nodded and came forward reluctantly. His every movement
suggested the will without the wit to escape. "You here?" he said.
"What are you doing away from Hythe at this time?" asked Melville.
"I came here to write a letter," said Chatteris.
He looked about him rather helplessly. Then he sat down beside Melville
and demanded a cigarette. Suddenly he plunged into intimacy.
"It is doubtful whether I shall contest Hythe," he remarked.
"Yes?"
"Yes."
He lit his cigarette.
"Would you?" he asked.
"Not a bit of it," said Melville. "But then it's not my line."
"Is it mine?"
"Isn't it a little late in the day to drop it?" said Melville. "You've
been put up for it now. Every one's at work. Miss Glendower----"
"I know," said Chatteris.
"Well?"
"I don't seem to want to go on."
"My dear man!"
"It's a bit of overwork perhaps. I'm off colour. Things have gone flat.
That's why I'm up here."
He did a very absurd thing. He threw away a quarter-smoked cigarette and
almost immediately demanded another.
"You've been a little immoderate with your statistics," said Melville.
Chatteris said something that struck Melville as having somehow been
said before. "Election, progress, good of humanity, public spirit. None
of these things interest me really," he said. "At least, not just now."
Melville waited.
"One gets brought up in an atmosphere in which it's always being
whispered that one should go for a career. You learn it at your mother's
knee. They never give you time to find out what you really want, they
keep on shoving you at that. They form your character. They rule your
mind. They rush you into it."
"They didn't rush me," said Melville.
"They rushed me, anyhow. And here I am!"
"You don't want a career?"
"Well-- Look what it is."
"Oh! if you look at what things are!"
"First of all, the messing about to get into the House. These confounded
parties mean nothing--absolutely nothing. They aren't even decent
factions. You blither to damned committees of damned tradesmen whose
sole idea for this world is to get overpaid for their self-respect; you
whisper and hobnob with local solicitors and get yourself seen about
with them; you ask about the charities and institutions, and lunch and
chatter and chum with every conceivable form of human conceit and
pushfulness and trickery----"
He broke off. "It isn't as if _they_ were up to anything! They're
working in their way, just as you are working in your way. It's the same
game with all of them. They chase a phantom gratification, they toil and
quarrel and envy, night and day, in the perpetual attempt to persuade
themselves in spite of everything that they are real and a success----"
He stopped and smoked.
Melville was spiteful. "Yes," he admitted, "but I thought _your_
little movement was to be something more than party politics and
self-advancement----?"
He left his sentence interrogatively incomplete.
"The condition of the poor," he said.
"Well?" said Chatteris, regarding him with a sort of stony admission in
his blue eyes.
Melville dodged the look. "At Sandgate," he said, "there was, you know,
a certain atmosphere of belief----"
"I know," said Chatteris for the second time.
"That's the devil of it!" said Chatteris after a pause.
"If I don't believe in the game I'm playing, if I'm left high and dry on
this shoal, with the tide of belief gone past me, it isn't _my_
planning, anyhow. I know the decent thing I ought to do. I mean to do
it; in the end I mean to do it; I'm talking in this way to relieve my
mind. I've started the game and I must see it out; I've put my hand to
the plough and I mustn't go back. That's why I came to London--to get it
over with myself. It was running up against you, set me off. You caught
me at the crisis."
"Ah!" said Melville.
"But for all that, the thing is as I said--none of these things interest
me really. It won't alter the fact that I am committed to fight a
phantom election about nothing in particular, for a party that's been
dead ten years. And if the ghosts win, go into the Parliament as a
constituent spectre.... There it is--as a mental phenomenon!"
He reiterated his cardinal article. "The interest is dead," he said,
"the will has no soul."
He became more critical. He bent a little closer to Melville's ear. "It
isn't really that I don't believe. When I say I don't believe in these
things I go too far. I do. I know, the electioneering, the intriguing is
a means to an end. There is work to be done, sound work, and important
work. Only----"
Melville turned an eye on him over his cigarette end.
Chatteris met it, seemed for a moment to cling to it. He became absurdly
confidential. He was evidently in the direst need of a confidential ear.
"I don't want to do it. When I sit down to it, square myself down in the
chair, you know, and say, now for the rest of my life this is IT--this
is your life, Chatteris; there comes a sort of terror, Melville."
"H'm," said Melville, and turned away. Then he turned on Chatteris with
the air of a family physician, and tapped his shoulder three times as he
spoke. "You've had too much statistics, Chatteris," he said.
He let that soak in. Then he turned about towards his interlocutor, and
toyed with a club ash tray. "It's every day has overtaken you," he said.
"You can't see the wood for the trees. You forget the spacious design
you are engaged upon, in the heavy details of the moment. You are like a
painter who has been working hard upon something very small and exacting
in a corner. You want to step back and look at the whole thing."
"No," said Chatteris, "that isn't quite it."
Melville indicated that he knew better.
"I keep on, stepping back and looking at it," said Chatteris. "Just
lately I've scarcely done anything else. I'll admit it's a spacious and
noble thing--political work done well--only-- I admire it, but it
doesn't grip my imagination. That's where the trouble comes in."
"What _does_ grip your imagination?" asked Melville. He was absolutely
certain the Sea Lady had been talking this paralysis into Chatteris, and
he wanted to see just how far she had gone. "For example," he tested,
"are there--by any chance--other dreams?"
Chatteris gave no sign at the phrase. Melville dismissed his suspicion.
"What do you mean--other dreams?" asked Chatteris.
"Is there conceivably another way--another sort of life--some other
aspect----?"
"It's out of the question," said Chatteris. He added, rather remarkably,
"Adeline's awfully good."
My cousin Melville acquiesced silently in Adeline's goodness.
"All this, you know, is a mood. My life is made for me--and it's a very
good life. It's better than I deserve."
"Heaps," said Melville.
"Much," said Chatteris defiantly.
"Ever so much," endorsed Melville.
"Let's talk of other things," said Chatteris. "It's what even the street
boys call _mawbid_ nowadays to doubt for a moment the absolute final
all-this-and-nothing-else-in-the-worldishness of whatever you happen to
be doing."
My cousin Melville, however, could think of no other sufficiently
interesting topic. "You left them all right at Sandgate?" he asked,
after a pause.
"Except little Bunting."
"Seedy?"
"Been fishing."
"Of course. Breezes and the spring tides.... And Miss Waters?"
Chatteris shot a suspicious glance at him. He affected the offhand
style. "_She's_ quite well," he said. "Looks just as charming as ever."
"She really means that canvassing?"
"She's spoken of it again."
"She'll do a lot for you," said Melville, and left a fine wide pause.
Chatteris assumed the tone of a man who gossips.
"Who is this Miss Waters?" he asked.
"A very charming person," said Melville and said no more.
Chatteris waited and his pretence of airy gossip vanished. He became
very much in earnest.
"Look here," he said. "Who is this Miss Waters?"
"How should _I_ know?" prevaricated Melville.
"Well, you do know. And the others know. Who is she?"
Melville met his eyes. "Won't they tell you?" he asked.
"That's just it," said Chatteris.
"Why do you want to know?"
"Why shouldn't I know?"
"There's a sort of promise to keep it dark."
"Keep _what_ dark?"
My cousin gestured.
"It can't be anything wrong?" My cousin made no sign.
"She may have had experiences?"
My cousin reflected a moment on the possibilities of the deep-sea life.
"She has had them," he said.
"I don't care, if she has."
There came a pause.
"Look here, Melville," said Chatteris, "I want to know this. Unless it's
a thing to be specially kept from me.... I don't like being among a lot
of people who treat me as an outsider. What is this something about Miss
Waters?"
"What does Miss Glendower say?"
"Vague things. She doesn't like her and she won't say why. And Mrs.
Bunting goes about with discretion written all over her. And she
herself looks at you-- And that maid of hers looks-- The thing's
worrying me."
"Why don't you ask the lady herself?"
"How can I, till I know what it is? Confound it! I'm asking _you_
plainly enough."
"Well," said Melville, and at the moment he had really decided to tell
Chatteris. But he hung upon the manner of presentation. He thought in
the moment to say, "The truth is, she is a mermaid." Then as instantly
he perceived how incredible this would be. He always suspected Chatteris
of a capacity for being continental and romantic. The man might fly out
at him for saying such a thing of a lady.
A dreadful doubt fell upon Melville. As you know, he had never seen that
tail with his own eyes. In these surroundings there came to him such an
incredulity of the Sea Lady as he had not felt even when first Mrs.
Bunting told him of her. All about him was an atmosphere of solid
reality, such as one can breathe only in a first-class London club.
Everywhere ponderous arm-chairs met the eye. There were massive tables
in abundance and match-boxes of solid rock. The matches were of some
specially large, heavy sort. On a ponderous elephant-legged green baize
table near at hand were several copies of the _Times_, the current
_Punch_, an inkpot of solid brass, and a paper weight of lead. _There
are other dreams!_ It seemed impossible. The breathing of an eminent
person in a chair in the far corner became very distinct in that
interval. It was heavy and resolute like the sound of a stone-mason's
saw. It insisted upon itself as the touchstone of reality. It seemed to
say that at the first whisper of a thing so utterly improbable as a
mermaid it would snort and choke.
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," said Melville.
"Well, tell me--anyhow."
My cousin looked at an empty chair beside him. It was evidently stuffed
with the very best horse-hair that money could procure, stuffed with
infinite skill and an almost religious care. It preached in the open
invitation of its expanded arms that man does not live by bread
alone--inasmuch as afterwards he needs a nap. An utterly dreamless
chair!
Mermaids?
He felt that he was after all quite possibly the victim of a foolish
delusion, hypnotised by Mrs. Bunting's beliefs. Was there not some more
plausible interpretation, some phrase that would lie out bridgeways from
the plausible to the truth?
"It's no good," he groaned at last.
Chatteris had been watching him furtively.
"Oh, I don't care a hang," he said, and shied his second cigarette into
the massively decorated fireplace. "It's no affair of mine."
Then quite abruptly he sprang to his feet and gesticulated with an
ineffectual hand.
"You needn't," he said, and seemed to intend to say many regrettable
things. Meanwhile until his intention ripened he sawed the air with his
ineffectual hand. I fancy he ended by failing to find a thing
sufficiently regrettable to express the pungency of the moment. He flung
about and went towards the door.
"Don't!" he said to the back of the newspaper of the breathing member.
"If you don't want to," he said to the respectful waiter at the door.
The hall-porter heard that he didn't care--he was damned if he did!
"He might be one of these here guests," said the hall-porter, greatly
shocked. "That's what comes of lettin' 'em in so young."
VI
Melville overcame an impulse to follow him.
"Confound the fellow!" said he.
And then as the whole outburst came into focus, he said with still more
emphasis, "Confound the fellow!"
He stood up and became aware that the member who had been asleep was now
regarding him with malevolent eyes. He perceived it was a hard and
invincible malevolence, and that no petty apologetics of demeanour could
avail against it. He turned about and went towards the door.
The interview had done my cousin good. His misery and distress had
lifted. He was presently bathed in a profound moral indignation, and
that is the very antithesis of doubt and unhappiness. The more he
thought it over, the more his indignation with Chatteris grew. That
sudden unreasonable outbreak altered all the perspectives of the case.
He wished very much that he could meet Chatteris again and discuss the
whole matter from a new footing.
"Think of it!" He thought so vividly and so verbally that he was nearly
talking to himself as he went along. It shaped itself into an outspoken
discourse in his mind.
"Was there ever a more ungracious, ungrateful, unreasonable creature
than this same Chatteris? He was the spoiled child of Fortune; things
came to him, things were given to him, his very blunders brought more
to him than other men's successes. Out of every thousand men, nine
hundred and ninety-nine might well find food for envy in this way luck
had served him. Many a one has toiled all his life and taken at last
gratefully the merest fraction of all that had thrust itself upon this
insatiable thankless young man. Even I," thought my cousin, "might envy
him--in several ways. And then, at the mere first onset of duty,
nay!--at the mere first whisper of restraint, this insubordination, this
protest and flight!
"Think!" urged my cousin, "of the common lot of men. Think of the many
who suffer from hunger----"
(It was a painful Socialistic sort of line to take, but in his mood of
moral indignation my cousin pursued it relentlessly.)
"Think of many who suffer from hunger, who lead lives of unremitting
toil, who go fearful, who go squalid, and withal strive, in a sort of
dumb, resolute way, their utmost to do their duty, or at any rate what
they think to be their duty. Think of the chaste poor women in the
world! Think again of the many honest souls who aspire to the service
of their kind, and are so hemmed about and preoccupied that they may
not give it! And then this pitiful creature comes, with his mental
gifts, his gifts of position and opportunity, the stimulus of great
ideas, and a _fiancée_, who is not only rich and beautiful--she _is_
beautiful!--but also the best of all possible helpers for him. And
he turns away. It isn't good enough. It takes no hold upon his
imagination, if you please. It isn't beautiful enough for him, and
that's the plain truth of the matter. What does the man _want_? What
does he expect?..."
My cousin's moral indignation took him the whole length of Piccadilly,
and along by Rotten Row, and along the flowery garden walks almost into
Kensington High Street, and so around by the Serpentine to his home, and
it gave him such an appetite for dinner as he had not had for many days.
Life was bright for him all that evening, and he sat down at last, at
two o'clock in the morning, before a needlessly lit, delightfully
fusillading fire in his flat to smoke one sound cigar before he went to
bed.
"No," he said suddenly, "I am not _mawbid_ either. I take the gifts the
gods will give me. I try to make myself happy, and a few other people
happy, too, to do a few little duties decently, and that is enough for
me. I don't look too deeply into things, and I don't look too widely
about things. A few old simple ideals----
"H'm.
"Chatteris is a dreamer, with an impossible, extravagant discontent.
What does he dream of?... Three parts he is a dreamer and the fourth
part--spoiled child."
"Dreamer...."
"Other dreams...."
"What other dreams could she mean?"
My cousin fell into profound musings. Then he started, looked about him,
saw the time by his Rathbone clock, got up suddenly and went to bed.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
THE CRISIS
I
The crisis came about a week from that time--I say about because of
Melville's conscientious inexactness in these matters. And so far as the
crisis goes, I seem to get Melville at his best. He was keenly
interested, keenly observant, and his more than average memory took some
excellent impressions. To my mind, at any rate, two at least of these
people come out, fuller and more convincingly than anywhere else in this
painfully disinterred story. He has given me here an Adeline I seem to
believe in, and something much more like Chatteris than any of the
broken fragments I have had to go upon, and amplify and fudge together
so far. And for all such transient lucidities in this mysterious story,
the reader no doubt will echo my Heaven be thanked!
Melville was called down to participate in the crisis at Sandgate by a
telegram from Mrs. Bunting, and his first exponent of the situation was
Fred Bunting.
"_Come down. Urgent. Please_," was the irresistible message from Mrs.
Bunting. My cousin took the early train and arrived at Sandgate in the
forenoon.
He was told that Mrs. Bunting was upstairs with Miss Glendower and that
she implored him to wait until she could leave her charge. "Miss
Glendower not well, then?" said Melville. "No, sir, not at all well,"
said the housemaid, evidently awaiting a further question. "Where are
the others?" he asked casually. The three younger young ladies had gone
to Hythe, said the housemaid, with a marked omission of the Sea Lady.
Melville has an intense dislike of questioning servants on points at
issue, so he asked nothing at all concerning Miss Waters. This general
absence of people from the room of familiar occupation conveyed the same
suggested warning of crisis as the telegram. The housemaid waited an
instant longer and withdrew.
He stood for a moment in the drawing-room and then walked out upon the
veranda. He perceived a richly caparisoned figure advancing towards him.
It was Fred Bunting. He had been taking advantage of the general
desertion of home to bathe from the house. He was wearing an umbrageous
white cotton hat and a striped blanket, and a more aggressively manly
pipe than any fully adult male would ever dream of smoking, hung from
the corner of his mouth.
"Hello!" he said. "The mater sent for you?"
Melville admitted the truth of this theory.
"There's ructions," said Fred, and removed the pipe. The act offered
conversation.
"Where's Miss Waters?"
"Gone."
"Back?"
"Lord, no! Catch her! She's gone to Lummidge's Hotel. With her maid.
Took a suite."
"Why----"
"The mater made a row with her."
"Whatever for?"
"Harry."
My cousin stared at the situation.
"It broke out," said Fred.
"What broke out?"
"The row. Harry's gone daft on her, Addy says."
"On Miss Waters?"
"Rather. Mooney. Didn't care for his electioneering--didn't care for his
ordinary nourishment. Loose ends. Didn't mention it to Adeline, but she
began to see it. Asked questions. Next day, went off. London. She asked
what was up. Three days' silence. Then--wrote to her."
Fred intensified all this by raising his eyebrows, pulling down the
corners of his mouth and nodding portentously. "Eh?" he said, and then
to make things clearer: "Wrote a letter."
"He didn't write to her about Miss Waters?"
"Don't know what he wrote about. Don't suppose he mentioned her name,
but I dare say he made it clear enough. All I know is that everything in
the house felt like elastic pulled tighter than it ought to be for two
whole days--everybody in a sort of complicated twist--and then there
was a snap. All that time Addy was writing letters to him and tearing
'em up, and no one could quite make it out. Everyone looked blue except
the Sea Lady. She kept her own lovely pink. And at the end of that time
the mater began asking things, Adeline chucked writing, gave the mater
half a hint, mater took it all in in an instant and the thing burst."
"Miss Glendower didn't----?"
"No, the mater did. Put it pretty straight too--as the mater can....
_She_ didn't deny it. Said she couldn't help herself, and that he was as
much hers as Adeline's. I _heard_ that," said Fred shamelessly. "Pretty
thick, eh?--considering he's engaged. And the mater gave it her pretty
straight. Said, 'I've been very much deceived in you, Miss Waters--very
much indeed.' I heard her...."
"And then?"
"Asked her to go. Said she'd requited us ill for taking her up when
nobody but a fisherman would have looked at her."
"She said that?"
"Well, words to that effect."
"And Miss Waters went?"
"In a first-class cab, maid and boxes in another, all complete. Perfect
lady.... Couldn't have believed if I hadn't seen it--the tail, I mean."
"And Miss Glendower?"
"Addy? Oh, she's been going it. Comes downstairs and does the pale-faced
heroine and goes upstairs and does the broken-hearted part. _I_ know.
It's all very well. You never had sisters. You know----"
Fred held his pipe elaborately out of the way and protruded his face to
a confidential nearness.
"I believe they half like it," said Fred, in a confidential half
whisper. "Such a go, you know. Mabel pretty near as bad. And the girls.
All making the very most they can of it. Me! I think Chatteris was the
only man alive to hear 'em. _I_ couldn't get up emotion as they do, if
my feet were being flayed. Cheerful home, eh? For holidays."
"Where's--the principal gentleman?" asked Melville a little grimly. "In
London?"
"Unprincipled gentleman, I call him," said Fred. "He's stopping down
here at the Métropole. Stuck."
"Down here? Stuck?"
"Rather. Stuck and set about."
My cousin tried for sidelights. "What's his attitude?" he asked.
"Slump," said Fred with intensity.
"This little blow-off has rather astonished him," he explained. "When he
wrote to say that the election didn't interest him for a bit, but he
hoped to pull around----"
"You said you didn't know what he wrote."
"I do that much," said Fred. "He no more thought they'd have spotted
that it meant Miss Waters than a baby. But women are so thundering
sharp, you know. They're born spotters. How it'll all end----"
"But why has he come to the Métropole?"
"Middle of the stage, I suppose," said Fred.
"What's his attitude?"
"Says he's going to see Adeline and explain everything--and doesn't do
it.... Puts it off. And Adeline, as far as I can gather, says that if he
doesn't come down soon, she's hanged if she'll see him, much as her
heart may be broken, and all that, if she doesn't. You know."
"Naturally," said Melville, rather inconsecutively. "And he doesn't?"
"Doesn't stir."
"Does he see--the other lady?"
"We don't know. We can't watch him. But if he does he's clever----"
"Why?"
"There's about a hundred blessed relatives of his in the place--came
like crows for a corpse. I never saw such a lot. Talk about a man of
good old family--it's decaying! I never saw such a high old family in my
life. Aunts they are chiefly."
"Aunts?"
"Aunts. Say, they've rallied round him. How they got hold of it I don't
know. Like vultures. Unless the mater-- But they're here. They're all at
him--using their influence with him, threatening to cut off legacies and
all that. There's one old girl at Bate's, Lady Poynting Mallow--least
bit horsey, but about as all right as any of 'em--who's been down here
twice. Seems a trifle disappointed in Adeline. And there's two aunts at
Wampach's--you know the sort that stop at Wampach's--regular hothouse
flowers--a watering-potful of real icy cold water would kill both of
'em. And there's one come over from the Continent, short hair, short
skirts--regular terror--she's at the Pavilion. They're all chasing round
saying, 'Where is this woman-fish sort of thing? Let me peek!'"
"Does that constitute the hundred relatives?"
"Practically. The Wampachers are sending for a Bishop who used to be his
schoolmaster----"
"No stone unturned, eh?"
"None."
"And has he found out yet----"
"That she's a mermaid? I don't believe he has. The pater went up to
tell him. Of course, he was a bit out of breath and embarrassed. And
Chatteris cut him down. 'At least let me hear nothing against her,' he
said. And the pater took that and came away. Good old pater. Eh?"
"And the aunts?"
"They're taking it in. Mainly they grasp the fact that he's going to
jilt Adeline, just as he jilted the American girl. The mermaid side they
seem to boggle at. Old people like that don't take to a new idea all at
once. The Wampach ones are shocked--but curious. They don't believe for
a moment she really is a mermaid, but they want to know all about it.
And the one down at the Pavilion simply said, 'Bosh! How can she breathe
under water? Tell me that, Mrs. Bunting. She's some sort of person you
have picked up, I don't know how, but mermaid she _cannot_ be.' They'd
be all tremendously down on the mater, I think, for picking her up, if
it wasn't that they can't do without her help to bring Addy round again.
Pretty mess all round, eh?"
"I suppose the aunts will tell him?"
"What?"
"About the tail."
"I suppose they will."
"And what then?"
"Heaven knows! Just as likely they won't."
My cousin meditated on the veranda tiles for a space.
"It amuses me," said Fred Bunting.
"Look here," said my cousin Melville, "what am I supposed to do? Why
have I been asked to come?"
"I don't know. Stir it up a bit, I expect. Everybody do a bit--like the
Christmas pudding."
"But--" said Melville.
[Illustration: Adjusting the folds of his blanket to a greater dignity.]
"I've been bathing," said Fred. "Nobody asked me to take a hand and I
didn't. It won't be a good pudding without me, but there you are!
There's only one thing I can see to do----"
"It might be the right thing. What is it?"
"Punch Chatteris's head."
"I don't see how that would help matters."
"Oh, it wouldn't help matters," said Fred, adding with an air of
conclusiveness, "There it is!" Then adjusting the folds of his blanket
to a greater dignity, and replacing his long extinct large pipe between
his teeth, he went on his way. The tail of his blanket followed him
reluctantly through the door. His bare feet padded across the hall and
became inaudible on the carpet of the stairs.
"Fred!" said Melville, going doorward with a sudden afterthought for
fuller particulars.
But Fred had gone.
Instead, Mrs. Bunting appeared.
II
She appeared with traces of recent emotion. "I telegraphed," she said.
"We are in dreadful trouble."
"Miss Waters, I gather----"
"She's gone."
She went towards the bell and stopped. "They'll get luncheon as usual,"
she said. "You will be wanting your luncheon."
She came towards him with rising hands. "You can _not_ imagine," she
said. "That poor child!"
"You must tell me," said Melville.
"I simply do not know what to do. I don't know where to turn." She came
nearer to him. She protested. "All that I did, Mr. Melville, I did for
the best. I saw there was trouble. I could see that I had been
deceived, and I stood it as long as I could. I _had_ to speak at last."
My cousin by leading questions and interrogative silences developed her
story a little.
"And every one," she said, "blames me. Every one."
"Everybody blames everybody who does anything, in affairs of this sort,"
said Melville. "You mustn't mind that."
"I'll try not to," she said bravely. "_You_ know, Mr. Melville----"
He laid his hand on her shoulder for a moment. "Yes," he said very
impressively, and I think Mrs. Bunting felt better.
"We all look to you," she said. "I don't know what I should do without
you."
"That's it," said Melville. "How do things stand? What am I to do?"
"Go to him," said Mrs. Bunting, "and put it all right."
"But suppose--" began Melville doubtfully.
"Go to her. Make her see what it would mean for him and all of us."
He tried to get more definite instructions. "Don't make difficulties,"
implored Mrs. Bunting. "Think of that poor girl upstairs. Think of us
all."
"Exactly," said Melville, thinking of Chatteris and staring despondently
out of the window.
"Bunting, I gather----"
"It is you or no one," said Mrs. Bunting, sailing over his unspoken
words. "Fred is too young, and Randolph--! He's not diplomatic. He--he
hectors."
"Does he?" exclaimed Melville.
"You should see him abroad. Often--many times I have had to
interfere.... No, it is you. You know Harry so well. He trusts you.
You can say things to him--no one else could say."
"That reminds me. Does _he_ know----"
"We don't know. How can we know? We know he is infatuated, that is all.
He is up there in Folkestone, and she is in Folkestone, and they may be
meeting----"
My cousin sought counsel with himself.
"Say you will go?" said Mrs. Bunting, with a hand upon his arm.
"I'll go," said Melville, "but I don't see what I can do!"
And Mrs. Bunting clasped his hand in both of her own plump shapely hands
and said she knew all along that he would, and that for coming down so
promptly to her telegram she would be grateful to him so long as she had
a breath to draw, and then she added, as if it were part of the same
remark, that he must want his luncheon.
He accepted the luncheon proposition in an incidental manner and
reverted to the question in hand.
"Do you know what his attitude----"
"He has written only to Addy."
"It isn't as if he had brought about this crisis?"
"It was Addy. He went away and something in his manner made her write
and ask him the reason why. So soon as she had his letter saying he
wanted to rest from politics for a little, that somehow he didn't seem
to find the interest in life he thought it deserved, she divined
everything----"
"Everything? Yes, but just what _is_ everything?"
"That _she_ had led him on."
"Miss Waters?"
"Yes."
My cousin reflected. So that was what they considered to be everything!
"I wish I knew just where he stood," he said at last, and followed
Mrs. Bunting luncheonward. In the course of that meal, which was
_tête-à-tête_, it became almost unsatisfactorily evident what a great
relief Melville's consent to interview Chatteris was to Mrs. Bunting.
Indeed, she seemed to consider herself relieved from the greater portion
of her responsibility in the matter, since Melville was bearing her
burden. She sketched out her defence against the accusations that had no
doubt been levelled at her, explicitly and implicitly.
"How was _I_ to know?" she asked, and she told over again the story of
that memorable landing, but with new, extenuating details. It was
Adeline herself who had cried first, "She must be saved!" Mrs. Bunting
made a special point of that. "And what else was there for me to do?"
she asked.
And as she talked, the problem before my cousin assumed graver and yet
graver proportions. He perceived more and more clearly the complexity
of the situation with which he was entrusted. In the first place it was
not at all clear that Miss Glendower was willing to receive back her
lover except upon terms, and the Sea Lady, he was quite sure, did not
mean to release him from any grip she had upon him. They were preparing
to treat an elemental struggle as if it were an individual case. It grew
more and more evident to him how entirely Mrs. Bunting overlooked the
essentially abnormal nature of the Sea Lady, how absolutely she regarded
the business as a mere every-day vacillation, a commonplace outbreak of
that jilting spirit which dwells, covered deep, perhaps, but never
entirely eradicated, in the heart of man; and how confidently she
expected him, with a little tactful remonstrance and pressure, to
restore the _status quo ante_.
As for Chatteris!--Melville shook his head at the cheese, and answered
Mrs. Bunting abstractedly.
III
"She wants to speak to you," said Mrs. Bunting, and Melville with a
certain trepidation went upstairs. He went up to the big landing with
the seats, to save Adeline the trouble of coming down. She appeared
dressed in a black and violet tea gown with much lace, and her dark hair
was done with a simple carefulness that suited it. She was pale, and her
eyes showed traces of tears, but she had a certain dignity that differed
from her usual bearing in being quite unconscious.
She gave him a limp hand and spoke in an exhausted voice.
"You know--all?" she asked.
"All the outline, anyhow."
"Why has he done this to me?"
Melville looked profoundly sympathetic through a pause.
"I feel," she said, "that it isn't coarseness."
"Certainly not," said Melville.
"It is some mystery of the imagination that I cannot understand. I
should have thought--his career at any rate--would have appealed...."
She shook her head and regarded a pot of ferns fixedly for a space.
"He has written to you?" asked Melville.
"Three times," she said, looking up.
Melville hesitated to ask the extent of that correspondence, but she
left no need for that.
"I had to ask him," she said. "He kept it all from me, and I had to
force it from him before he would tell."
"Tell!" said Melville, "what?"
"What he felt for her and what he felt for me."
"But did he----?"
"He has made it clearer. But still even now. No, I don't understand."
She turned slowly and watched Melville's face as she spoke: "You know,
Mr. Melville, that this has been an enormous shock to me. I suppose I
never really knew him. I suppose I--idealised him. I thought he cared
for--our work at any rate.... He _did_ care for our work. He believed in
it. Surely he believed in it."
"He does," said Melville.
"And then-- But how can he?"
"He is--he is a man with rather a strong imagination."
"Or a weak will?"
"Relatively--yes."
"It is so strange," she sighed. "It is so inconsistent. It is like
a child catching at a new toy. Do you know, Mr. Melville"--she
hesitated--"all this has made me feel old. I feel very much older,
very much wiser than he is. I cannot help it. I am afraid it is for
all women ... to feel that sometimes."
She reflected profoundly. "For _all_ women-- The child, man! I see now
just what Sarah Grand meant by that."
She smiled a wan smile. "I feel just as if he had been a naughty child.
And I--I worshipped him, Mr. Melville," she said, and her voice
quivered.
My cousin coughed and turned about to stare hard out of the window. He
was, he perceived, much more shockingly inadequate even than he had
expected to be.
"If I thought she could make him happy!" she said presently, leaving a
hiatus of generous self-sacrifice.
"The case is--complicated," said Melville.
Her voice went on, clear and a little high, resigned, impenetrably
assured.
"But she would not. All his better side, all his serious side-- She
would miss it and ruin it all."
"Does he--" began Melville and repented of the temerity of his question.
"Yes?" she said.
"Does he--ask to be released?"
"No.... He wants to come back to me."
"And you----"
"He doesn't come."
"But do you--do you want him back?"
"How can I say, Mr. Melville? He does not say certainly even that he
wants to come back."
My cousin Melville looked perplexed. He lived on the superficies of
emotion, and these complexities in matters he had always assumed were
simple, put him out.
"There are times," she said, "when it seems to me that my love for him
is altogether dead.... Think of the disillusionment--the shock--the
discovery of such weakness."
My cousin lifted his eyebrows and shook his head in agreement.
"His feet--to find his feet were of clay!"
There came a pause.
"It seems as if I have never loved him. And then--and then I think of
all the things that still might be."
Her voice made him look up, and he saw that her mouth was set hard and
tears were running down her cheeks.
It occurred to my cousin, he says, that he would touch her hand in a
sympathetic manner, and then it occurred to him that he wouldn't. Her
words rang in his thoughts for a space, and then he said somewhat
tardily, "He may still be all those things."
"I suppose he may," she said slowly and without colour. The weeping
moment had passed.
"What is she?" she changed abruptly. "What is this being, who has come
between him and all the realities of life? What is there about her--?
And why should I have to compete with her, because he--because he
doesn't know his own mind?"
"For a man," said Melville, "to know his own mind is--to have exhausted
one of the chief interests in life. After that--! A cultivated extinct
volcano--if ever it was a volcano."
He reflected egotistically for a space. Then with a secret start he came
back to consider her.
"What is there," she said, with that deliberate attempt at clearness
which was one of her antipathetic qualities for Melville--"what is there
that she has, that she offers, that _I_----?"
Melville winced at this deliberate proposal of appalling comparisons.
All the catlike quality in his soul came to his aid. He began to edge
away, and walk obliquely and generally to shirk the issue. "My dear Miss
Glendower," he said, and tried to make that seem an adequate reply.
"What _is_ the difference?" she insisted.
"There are impalpable things," waived Melville. "They are above reason
and beyond describing."
"But you," she urged, "you take an attitude, you must have an
impression. Why don't you-- Don't you see, Mr. Melville, this is
very"--her voice caught for a moment--"very vital for me. It isn't kind
of you, if you have impressions-- I'm sorry, Mr. Melville, if I seem to
be trying to get too much from you. I--I want to know."
It came into Melville's head for a moment that this girl had something
in her, perhaps, that was just a little beyond his former judgments.
"I must admit, I have a sort of impression," he said.
"You are a man; you know him; you know all sorts of things--all sorts of
ways of looking at things, I don't know. If you could go so far--as to
be frank."
"Well," said Melville and stopped.
She hung over him as it were, as a tense silence.
"There _is_ a difference," he admitted, and still went unhelped.
"How can I put it? I think in certain ways you contrast with her, in a
way that makes things easier for her. He has--I know the thing sounds
like cant, only you know, _he_ doesn't plead it in defence--he has a
temperament, to which she sometimes appeals more than you do."
"Yes, I know, but how?"
"Well----"
"Tell me."
"You are austere. You are restrained. Life--for a man like Chatteris--is
schooling. He has something--something perhaps more worth having than
most of us have--but I think at times--it makes life harder for him than
it is for a lot of us. Life comes at him, with limitations and
regulations. He knows his duty well enough. And you-- You mustn't mind
what I say too much, Miss Glendower--I may be wrong."
"Go on," she said, "go on."
"You are too much--the agent general of his duty."
"But surely!--what else----?"
"I talked to him in London and then I thought he was quite in the
wrong. Since that I've thought all sorts of things--even that you might
be in the wrong. In certain minor things."
"Don't mind my vanity now," she cried. "Tell me."
"You see you have defined things--very clearly. You have made it clear
to him what you expect him to be, and what you expect him to do. It is
like having built a house in which he is to live. For him, to go to her
is like going out of a house, a very fine and dignified house, I admit,
into something larger, something adventurous and incalculable. She
is--she has an air of being--_natural_. She is as lax and lawless as the
sunset, she is as free and familiar as the wind. She doesn't--if I may
put it in this way--she doesn't love and respect him when he is this,
and disapprove of him highly when he is that; she takes him altogether.
She has the quality of the open sky, of the flight of birds, of deep
tangled places, she has the quality of the high sea. That I think is
what she is for him, she is the Great Outside. You--you have the
quality----"
He hesitated.
"Go on," she insisted. "Let us get the meaning."
"Of an edifice.... I don't sympathise with him," said Melville. "I am a
tame cat and I should scratch and mew at the door directly I got outside
of things. I don't want to go out. The thought scares me. But he is
different."
"Yes," she said, "he is different."
For a time it seemed that Melville's interpretation had hold of her. She
stood thoughtful. Slowly other aspects of the thing came into his mind.
"Of course," she said, thinking as she looked at him. "Yes. Yes. That is
the impression. That is the quality. But in reality-- There are other
things in the world beside effects and impressions. After all, that
is--an analogy. It is pleasant to go out of houses and dwellings into
the open air, but most of us, nearly all of us must live in houses."
"Decidedly," said Melville.
"He cannot-- What can he do with her? How can he live with her? What
life could they have in common?"
"It's a case of attraction," said Melville, "and not of plans."
"After all," she said, "he must come back--if I let him come back. He
may spoil everything now; he may lose his election and be forced to
start again, lower and less hopefully; he may tear his heart to
pieces----"
She stopped at a sob.
"Miss Glendower," said Melville abruptly.
"I don't think you quite understand."
"Understand what?"
"You think he cannot marry this--this being who has come among us?"
"How could he?"
"No--he couldn't. You think his imagination has wandered away from
you--to something impossible. That generally, in an aimless way, he has
cut himself up for nothing, and made an inordinate fool of himself, and
that it's simply a business of putting everything back into place
again."
He paused and she said nothing. But her face was attentive. "What you do
not understand," he went on, "what no one seems to understand, is that
she comes----"
"Out of the sea."
"Out of some other world. She comes, whispering that this life is a
phantom life, unreal, flimsy, limited, casting upon everything a spell
of disillusionment----"
"So that _he_----"
"Yes, and then she whispers, 'There are better dreams!'"
The girl regarded him in frank perplexity.
"She hints of these vague better dreams, she whispers of a way----"
"_What_ way?"
"I do not know what way. But it is something--something that tears at
the very fabric of this daily life."
"You mean----?"
"She is a mermaid, she is a thing of dreams and desires, a siren, a
whisper and a seduction. She will lure him with her----"
He stopped.
"Where?" she whispered.
"Into the deeps."
"The deeps?"
They hung upon a long pause. Melville sought vagueness with infinite
solicitude, and could not find it. He blurted out at last: "There can
be but one way out of this dream we are all dreaming, you know."
"And that way?"
"That way--" began Melville and dared not say it.
"You mean," she said, with a pale face, half awakened to a new thought,
"the way is----?"
Melville shirked the word. He met her eyes and nodded weakly.
"But how--?" she asked.
"At any rate"--he said hastily, seeking some palliative phrase--"at any
rate, if she gets him, this little world of yours-- There will be no
coming back for him, you know."
"No coming back?" she said.
"No coming back," said Melville.
"But are you sure?" she doubted.
"Sure?"
"That it is so?"
"That desire is desire, and the deep the deep--yes."
"I never thought--" she began and stopped.
"Mr. Melville," she said, "you know I don't understand. I thought--I
scarcely know what I thought. I thought he was trivial and foolish to
let his thoughts go wandering. I agreed--I see your point--as to the
difference in our effect upon him. But this--this suggestion that for
him she may be something determining and final-- After all, she----"
"She is nothing," he said. "She is the hand that takes hold of him, the
shape that stands for things unseen."
"What things unseen?"
My cousin shrugged his shoulders. "Something we never find in life," he
said. "Something we are always seeking."
"But what?" she asked.
Melville made no reply. She scrutinised his face for a time, and then
looked out at the sunlight again.
"Do you want him back?" he said.
"I don't know."
"Do you want him back?"
"I feel as if I had never wanted him before."
"And now?"
"Yes.... But--if he will not come back?"
"He will not come back," said Melville, "for the work."
"I know."
"He will not come back for his self-respect--or any of those things."
"No."
"Those things, you know, are only fainter dreams. All the palace you
have made for him is a dream. But----"
"Yes?"
"He might come back--" he said, and looked at her and stopped. He tells
me he had some vague intention of startling her, rousing her, wounding
her to some display of romantic force, some insurgence of passion, that
might yet win Chatteris back, and then in that moment, and like a blow,
it came to him how foolish such a fancy had been. There she stood
impenetrably herself, limitedly intelligent, well-meaning, imitative,
and powerless. Her pose, her face, suggested nothing but a clear and
reasonable objection to all that had come to her, a critical antagonism,
a steady opposition. And then, amazingly, she changed. She looked up,
and suddenly held out both her hands, and there was something in her
eyes that he had never seen before.
Melville took her hands mechanically, and for a second or so they stood
looking with a sort of discovery into each other's eyes.
"Tell him," she said, with an astounding perfection of simplicity, "to
come back to me. There can be no other thing than what I am. Tell him to
come back to me!"
"And----?"
"Tell him _that_."
"Forgiveness?"
"No! Tell him I want him. If he will not come for that he will not come
at all. If he will not come back for that"--she halted for a moment--"I
do not want him. No! I do not want him. He is not mine and he may go."
His passive hold of her hands became a pressure. Then they dropped apart
again.
"You are very good to help us," she said as he turned to go.
He looked at her. "You are very good to help me," she said, and then:
"Tell him whatever you like if only he will come back to me!... No!
Tell him what I have said." He saw she had something more to say, and
stopped. "You know, Mr. Melville, all this is like a book newly opened
to me. Are you sure----?"
"Sure?"
"Sure of what you say--sure of what she is to him--sure that if he goes
on he will--" She stopped.
He nodded.
"It means--" she said and stopped again.
"No adventure, no incident, but a going out from all that this life has
to offer."
"You mean," she insisted, "you mean----?"
"Death," said Melville starkly, and for a space both stood without a
word.
She winced, and remained looking into his eyes. Then she spoke again.
"Mr. Melville, tell him to come back to me."
"And----?"
"Tell him to come back to me, or"--a sudden note of passion rang in her
voice--"if I have no hold upon him, let him go his way."
"But--" said Melville.
"I know," she cried, with her face set, "I know. But if he is mine he
will come to me, and if he is not-- Let him dream his dream."
Her clenched hand tightened as she spoke. He saw in her face she would
say no more, that she wanted urgently to leave it there. He turned again
towards the staircase. He glanced at her and went down.
As he looked up from the bend of the stairs she was still standing in
the light.
He was moved to proclaim himself in some manner her adherent, but he
could think of nothing better than: "Whatever I can do I will." And so,
after a curious pause, he departed, rather stumblingly, from her sight.
IV
After this interview it was right and proper that Melville should have
gone at once to Chatteris, but the course of events in the world does
occasionally display a lamentable disregard for what is right and
proper. Points of view were destined to crowd upon him that day--for the
most part entirely unsympathetic points of view. He found Mrs. Bunting
in the company of a boldly trimmed bonnet in the hall, waiting, it
became clear, to intercept him.
As he descended, in a state of extreme preoccupation, the boldly trimmed
bonnet revealed beneath it a white-faced, resolute person in a duster
and sensible boots. This stranger, Mrs. Bunting made apparent, was Lady
Poynting Mallow, one of the more representative of the Chatteris aunts.
Her ladyship made a few enquiries about Adeline with an eye that took
Melville's measure, and then, after agreeing to a number of the
suggestions Mrs. Bunting had to advance, proposed that he should escort
her back to her hotel. He was much too exercised with Adeline to discuss
the proposal. "I walk," she said. "And we go along the lower road."
He found himself walking.
She remarked, as the Bunting door closed behind them, that it was always
a comfort to have to do with a man; and there was a silence for a space.
I don't think at that time Melville completely grasped the fact that he
had a companion. But presently his meditations were disturbed by her
voice. He started.
"I beg your pardon," he said.
"That Bunting woman is a fool," repeated Lady Poynting Mallow.
There was a slight interval for consideration.
"She's an old friend of mine," said Melville.
"Quite possibly," said Lady Poynting Mallow.
The position seemed a little awkward to Melville for a moment. He
flicked a fragment of orange peel into the road. "I want to get to the
bottom of all this," said Lady Poynting Mallow. "Who _is_ this other
woman?"
"What other woman?"
"_Tertium quid_," said Lady Poynting Mallow, with a luminous
incorrectness.
"Mermaid, I gather," said Melville.
"What's the objection to her?"
"Tail."
"Fin and all?"
"Complete."
"You're sure of it?"
"Certain."
"How do you know?"
"I'm certain," repeated Melville with a quite unusual testiness.
The lady reflected.
"Well, there are worse things in the world than a fishy tail," she said
at last.
Melville saw no necessity for a reply. "H'm," said Lady Poynting Mallow,
apparently by way of comment on his silence, and for a space they went
on.
"That Glendower girl is a fool too," she added after a pause.
My cousin opened his mouth and shut it again. How can one answer when
ladies talk in this way? But if he did not answer, at any rate his
preoccupation was gone. He was now acutely aware of the determined
person at his side.
"She has means?" she asked abruptly.
"Miss Glendower?"
"No. I know all about her. The other?"
"The mermaid?"
"Yes, the mermaid. Why not?"
"Oh, _she_--Very considerable means. Galleons. Phoenician treasure
ships, wrecked frigates, submarine reefs----"
"Well, that's all right. And now will you tell me, Mr. Melville, why
shouldn't Harry have her? What if she is a mermaid? It's no worse than
an American silver mine, and not nearly so raw and ill-bred."
"In the first place there's his engagement----"
"Oh, _that_!"
"And in the next there's the Sea Lady."
"But I thought she----"
"She's a mermaid."
"It's no objection. So far as I can see, she'd make an excellent wife
for him. And, as a matter of fact, down here she'd be able to help him
in just the right way. The member here--he'll be fighting--this Sassoon
man--makes a lot of capital out of deep-sea cables. Couldn't be better.
Harry could dish him easily. That's all right. Why shouldn't he have
her?"
She stuck her hands deeply into the pockets of her dust-coat, and a
china-blue eye regarded Melville from under the brim of the boldly
trimmed bonnet.
"You understand clearly she is a properly constituted mermaid with a
real physical tail?"
"Well?" said Lady Poynting Mallow.
"Apart from any question of Miss Glendower----"
"That's understood."
"I think that such a marriage would be impossible."
"Why?"
My cousin played round the question. "She's an immortal, for example,
with a past."
"Simply makes her more interesting."
Melville tried to enter into her point of view. "You think," he said,
"she would go to London for him, and marry at St. George's, Hanover
Square, and pay for a mansion in Park Lane and visit just anywhere he
liked?"
"That's precisely what she would do. Just now, with a Court that is
waking up----"
"It's precisely what she won't do," said Melville.
"But any woman would do it who had the chance."
"She's a mermaid."
"She's a fool," said Lady Poynting Mallow.
"She doesn't even mean to marry him; it doesn't enter into her code."
"The hussy! What does she mean?"
My cousin made a gesture seaward. "That!" he said. "She's a mermaid."
"What?"
"Out there."
"Where?"
"There!"
Lady Poynting Mallow scanned the sea as if it were some curious new
object. "It's an amphibious outlook for the family," she said after
reflection. "But even then--if she doesn't care for society and it makes
Harry happy--and perhaps after they are tired of--rusticating----"
"I don't think you fully realise that she is a mermaid," said Melville;
"and Chatteris, you know, breathes air."
"That _is_ a difficulty," admitted Lady Poynting Mallow, and studied the
sunlit offing for a space.
"I don't see why it shouldn't be managed for all that," she considered
after a pause.
"It can't be," said Melville with arid emphasis.
"She cares for him?"
"She's come to fetch him."
"If she wants him badly he might make terms. In these affairs
it's always one or other has to do the buying. She'd have to
_marry_--anyhow."
My cousin regarded her impenetrably satisfied face.
"He could have a yacht and a diving bell," she suggested; "if she wanted
him to visit her people."
"They are pagan demigods, I believe, and live in some mythological way
in the Mediterranean."
"Dear Harry's a pagan himself--so that doesn't matter, and as for being
mythological--all good families are. He could even wear a diving dress
if one could be found to suit him."
"I don't think that anything of the sort is possible for a moment."
"Simply because you've never been a woman in love," said Lady Poynting
Mallow with an air of vast experience.
She continued the conversation. "If it's sea water she wants it would
be quite easy to fit up a tank wherever they lived, and she could
easily have a bath chair like a sitz bath on wheels.... Really, Mr.
Milvain----"
"Melville."
"Mr. Melville, I don't see where your 'impossible' comes in."
"Have you seen the lady?"
"Do you think I've been in Folkestone two days doing nothing?"
"You don't mean you've called on her?"
"Dear, no! It's Harry's place to settle that. But I've seen her in her
bath chair on the Leas, and I'm certain I've never seen any one who
looked so worthy of dear Harry. _Never!_"
"Well, well," said Melville. "Apart from any other considerations, you
know, there's Miss Glendower."
"I've never regarded her as a suitable wife for Harry."
"Possibly not. Still--she exists."
"So many people do," said Lady Poynting Mallow.
She evidently regarded that branch of the subject as dismissed.
They pursued their way in silence.
"What I wanted to ask you, Mr. Milvain----"
"Melville."
"Mr. Melville, is just precisely where you come into this business?"
"I'm a friend of Miss Glendower."
"Who wants him back."
"Frankly--yes."
"Isn't she devoted to him?"
"I presume as she's engaged----"
"She ought to be devoted to him--yes. Well, why can't she see that she
ought to release him for his own good?"
"She doesn't see it's for his good. Nor do I."
"Simply an old-fashioned prejudice because the woman's got a tail. Those
old frumps at Wampach's are quite of your opinion."
Melville shrugged his shoulders.
"And so I suppose you're going to bully and threaten on account of Miss
Glendower.... You'll do no good."
"May I ask what you are going to do?"
"What a good aunt always does."
"And that?"
"Let him do what he likes."
"Suppose he wants to drown himself?"
"My dear Mr. Milvain, Harry isn't a fool."
"I've told you she's a mermaid."
"Ten times."
A constrained silence fell between them.
It became apparent they were near the Folkestone Lift.
"You'll do no good," said Lady Poynting Mallow.
Melville's escort concluded at the lift station. There the lady turned
upon him.
"I'm greatly obliged to you for coming, Mr. Milvain," she said; "and
very glad to hear your views of this matter. It's a peculiar business,
but I hope we're sensible people. You think over what I have said. As a
friend of Harry's. You _are_ a friend of Harry's?"
"We've known each other some years."
"I feel sure you will come round to my point of view sooner or later. It
is so obviously the best thing for him."
"There's Miss Glendower."
"If Miss Glendower is a womanly woman, she will be ready to make any
sacrifice for his good."
And with that they parted.
In the course of another minute Melville found himself on the side of
the road opposite the lift station, regarding the ascending car. The
boldly trimmed bonnet, vivid, erect, assertive, went gliding upward, a
perfect embodiment of sound common sense. His mind was lapsing once
again into disorder; he was stunned, as it were, by the vigour of her
ladyship's view. Could any one not absolutely right be quite so clear
and emphatic? And if so, what became of all that oppression of
foreboding, that sinister promise of an escape, that whisper of "other
dreams," that had dominated his mind only a short half-hour before?
He turned his face back to Sandgate, his mind a theatre of warring
doubts. Quite vividly he could see the Sea Lady as Lady Poynting Mallow
saw her, as something pink and solid and smart and wealthy, and, indeed,
quite abominably vulgar, and yet quite as vividly he recalled her as she
had talked to him in the garden, her face full of shadows, her eyes of
deep mystery, and the whisper that made all the world about him no more
than a flimsy, thin curtain before vague and wonderful, and hitherto,
quite unsuspected things.
V
Chatteris was leaning against the railings. He started violently at
Melville's hand upon his shoulder. They made awkward greetings.
"The fact is," said Melville, "I--I have been asked to talk to you."
"Don't apologise," said Chatteris. "I'm glad to have it out with some
one."
There was a brief silence.
They stood side by side--looking down upon the harbour. Behind, the
evening band played remotely and the black little promenaders went to
and fro under the tall electric lights. I think Chatteris decided to be
very self-possessed at first--a man of the world.
"It's a gorgeous night," he said.
"Glorious," said Melville, playing up to the key set.
He clicked his cutter on a cigar. "There was something you wanted me to
tell you----"
"I know all that," said Chatteris with the shoulder towards Melville
becoming obtrusive. "I know everything."
"You have seen and talked to her?"
"Several times."
There was perhaps a minute's pause.
"What are you going to do?" asked Melville.
Chatteris made no answer and Melville did not repeat his question.
Presently Chatteris turned about. "Let's walk," he said, and they paced
westward, side by side.
He made a little speech. "I'm sorry to give everybody all this trouble,"
he said with an air of having prepared his sentences; "I suppose there
is no question that I have behaved like an ass. I am profoundly sorry.
Largely it is my own fault. But you know--so far as the overt kick-up
goes--there is a certain amount of blame attaches to our outspoken
friend Mrs. Bunting."
"I'm afraid there is," Melville admitted.
"You know there are times when one is under the necessity of having
moods. It doesn't help them to drag them into general discussion."
"The mischief's done."
"You know Adeline seems to have objected to the presence of--this sea
lady at a very early stage. Mrs. Bunting overruled her. Afterwards when
there was trouble she seems to have tried to make up for it."
"I didn't know Miss Glendower had objected."
"She did. She seems to have seen--ahead."
Chatteris reflected. "Of course all that doesn't excuse me in the least.
But it's a sort of excuse for _your_ being dragged into this bother."
He said something less distinctly about a "stupid bother" and "private
affairs."
They found themselves drawing near the band and already on the
outskirts of its territory of votaries. Its cheerful rhythms became
insistent. The canopy of the stand was a focus of bright light,
music-stands and instruments sent out beams of reflected brilliance,
and a luminous red conductor in the midst of the lantern guided the
ratatoo-tat, ratatoo-tat of a popular air. Voices, detached fragments
of conversation, came to our talkers and mingled impertinently with
their thoughts.
"I wouldn't 'ave no truck with 'im, not after that," said a young person
to her friend.
"Let's get out of this," said Chatteris abruptly.
They turned aside from the high path of the Leas to the head of some
steps that led down the declivity. In a few moments it was as if those
imposing fronts of stucco, those many-windowed hotels, the electric
lights on the tall masts, the band-stand and miscellaneous holiday
British public, had never existed. It is one of Folkestone's best
effects, that black quietness under the very feet of a crowd. They no
longer heard the band even, only a remote suggestion of music filtered
to them over the brow. The black-treed slopes fell from them to the surf
below, and out at sea were the lights of many ships. Away to the
westward like a swarm of fire-flies hung the lights of Hythe. The two
men sat down on a vacant seat in the dimness. For a time neither spoke.
Chatteris impressed Melville with an air of being on the defensive. He
murmured in a meditative undertone, "I wouldn't 'ave no truck with 'im
not after that."
"I will admit by every standard," he said aloud, "that I have been
flappy and feeble and wrong. Very. In these things there is a prescribed
and definite course. To hesitate, to have two points of view, is
condemned by all right-thinking people.... Still--one has the two points
of view.... You have come up from Sandgate?"
"Yes."
"Did you see Miss Glendower?"
"Yes."
"Talked to her?... I suppose-- What do you think of her?"
His cigar glowed into an expectant brightness while Melville hesitated
at his answer, and showed his eyes thoughtful upon Melville's face.
"I've never thought her--" Melville sought more diplomatic phrasing.
"I've never found her exceptionally attractive before. Handsome, you
know, but not--winning. But this time, she seemed ... rather splendid."
"She is," said Chatteris, "she is."
He sat forward and began flicking imaginary ash from the end of his
cigar.
"She _is_ splendid," he admitted. "You--only begin to imagine. You
don't, my dear man, know that girl. She is not--quite--in your line.
She is, I assure you, the straightest and cleanest and clearest human
being I have ever met. She believes so firmly, she does right so
simply, there is a sort of queenly benevolence, a sort of integrity of
benevolence----"
He left the sentence unfinished, as if unfinished it completely
expressed his thought.
"She wants you to go back to her," said Melville bluntly.
"I know," said Chatteris and flicked again at that ghostly ash. "She
has written that.... That's just where her complete magnificence comes
in. She doesn't fence and fool about, as the she-women do. She doesn't
squawk and say, 'You've insulted me and everything's at an end;' and
she doesn't squawk and say, 'For God's sake come back to me!' _She_
doesn't say, she 'won't 'ave no truck with me not after this.' She
writes--straight. I don't believe, Melville, I half knew her until
all this business came up. She comes out.... Before that it was, as
you said, and I quite perceive--I perceived all along--a little
too--statistical."
He became meditative, and his cigar glow waned and presently vanished
altogether.
"You are going back?"
"By Jove! _Yes._"
Melville stirred slightly and then they both sat rigidly quiet for a
space. Then abruptly Chatteris flung away his extinct cigar. He seemed
to fling many other things away with that dim gesture. "Of course," he
said, "I shall go back.
"It is not my fault," he insisted, "that this trouble, this separation,
has ever arisen. I was moody, I was preoccupied, I know--things had got
into my head. But if I'd been left alone....
"I have been forced into this position," he summarised.
"You understand," said Melville, "that--though I think matters are
indefined and distressing just now--I don't attach blame--anywhere."
"You're open-minded," said Chatteris. "That's just your way. And I can
imagine how all this upset and discomfort distresses you. You're awfully
good to keep so open-minded and not to consider me an utter outcast, an
ill-regulated disturber of the order of the world."
"It's a distressing state of affairs," said Melville. "But perhaps I
understand the forces pulling at you--better than you imagine."
"They're very simple, I suppose."
"Very."
"And yet----?"
"Well?"
He seemed to hesitate at a dangerous topic. "The other," he said.
Melville's silence bade him go on.
He plunged from his prepared attitude. "What is it? Why should--this
being--come into my life, as she has done, if it _is_ so simple? What is
there about her, or me, that has pulled me so astray? She has, you know.
Here we are at sixes and sevens! It's not the situation, it's the mental
conflict. Why am I pulled about? She has got into my imagination. How? I
haven't the remotest idea."
"She's beautiful," meditated Melville.
"She's beautiful certainly. But so is Miss Glendower."
"She's very beautiful. I'm not blind, Chatteris. She's beautiful in a
different way."
"Yes, but that's only the name for the effect. _Why_ is she very
beautiful?"
Melville shrugged his shoulders.
"She's not beautiful to every one."
"You mean?"
"Bunting keeps calm."
"Oh--_he_----!"
"And other people don't seem to see it--as I do."
"Some people seem to see no beauty at all, as we do. With emotion, that
is."
"Why do we?"
"We see--finer."
"Do we? Is it finer? Why should it be finer to see beauty where it is
fatal to us to see it? Why? Unless we are to believe there is no reason
in things, why should this--impossibility, be beautiful to any one
anyhow? Put it as a matter of reason, Melville. Why should _her_ smile
be so sweet to me, why should _her_ voice move me! Why her's and not
Adeline's? Adeline has straight eyes and clear eyes and fine eyes, and
all the difference there can be, what is it? An infinitesimal curving of
the lid, an infinitesimal difference in the lashes--and it shatters
everything--in this way. Who could measure the difference, who could
tell the quality that makes me _swim_ in the sound of her voice.... The
difference? After all, it's a visible thing, it's a material thing! It's
in my eyes. By Jove!" he laughed abruptly. "Imagine old Helmholtz trying
to gauge it with a battery of resonators, or Spencer in the light of
Evolution and the Environment explaining it away!"
"These things are beyond measurement," said Melville.
"Not if you measure them by their effect," said Chatteris. "And anyhow,
why do they take us? That is the question I can't get away from just
now."
My cousin meditated, no doubt with his hands deep in his trousers'
pockets. "It is illusion," he said. "It is a sort of glamour. After all,
look at it squarely. What is she? What can she give you? She promises
you vague somethings.... She is a snare, she is deception. She is the
beautiful mask of death."
"Yes," said Chatteris. "I know."
And then again, "I know.
"There is nothing for me to learn about that," he said. "But why--why
should the mask of death be beautiful? After all-- We get our duty by
good hard reasoning. Why should reason and justice carry everything?
Perhaps after all there are things beyond our reason, perhaps after all
desire has a claim on us?"
He stopped interrogatively and Melville was profound. "I think," said
my cousin at last, "Desire _has_ a claim on us. Beauty, at any rate----
"I mean," he explained, "we are human beings. We are matter with minds
growing out of ourselves. We reach downward into the beautiful
wonderland of matter, and upward to something--" He stopped, from sheer
dissatisfaction with the image. "In another direction, anyhow," he tried
feebly. He jumped at something that was not quite his meaning. "Man is a
sort of half-way house--he must compromise."
"As you do?"
"Well. Yes. I try to strike a balance."
"A few old engravings--good, I suppose--a little luxury in furniture and
flowers, a few things that come within your means. Art--in moderation,
and a few kindly acts of the pleasanter sort, a certain respect for
truth; duty--also in moderation. Eh? It's just that even balance that I
cannot contrive. I cannot sit down to the oatmeal of this daily life and
wash it down with a temperate draught of beauty and water. Art!... I
suppose I'm voracious, I'm one of the unfit--for the civilised stage.
I've sat down once, I've sat down twice, to perfectly sane, secure, and
reasonable things.... It's not my way."
He repeated, "It's not my way."
Melville, I think, said nothing to that. He was distracted from the
immediate topic by the discussion of his own way of living. He was lost
in egotistical comparisons. No doubt he was on the verge of saying, as
most of us would have been under the circumstances: "I don't think you
quite understand my position."
"But, after all, what is the good of talking in this way?" exclaimed
Chatteris abruptly. "I am simply trying to elevate the whole business by
dragging in these wider questions. It's justification, when I didn't
mean to justify. I have to choose between life with Adeline and this
woman out of the sea."
"Who is Death."
"How do I know she is Death?"
"But you said you had made your choice!"
"I have."
He seemed to recollect.
"I have," he corroborated. "I told you. I am going back to see Miss
Glendower to-morrow.
"Yes." He recalled further portions of what I believe was some prepared
and ready-phrased decision--some decision from which the conversation had
drifted. "The need of my life is discipline, the habit of persistence,
of ignoring side issues and wandering thoughts. Discipline!"
"And work."
"Work, if you like to put it so; it's the same thing. The trouble so far
has been I haven't worked hard enough. I've stopped to speak to the
woman by the wayside. I've paltered with compromise, and the other thing
has caught me.... I've got to renounce it, that is all."
"It isn't that your work is contemptible."
"By Jove! No. It's--arduous. It has its dusty moments. There are places
to climb that are not only steep but muddy----"
"The world wants leaders. It gives a man of your class a great deal.
Leisure. Honour. Training and high traditions----"
"And it expects something back. I know. I am wrong--have been wrong
anyhow. This dream has taken me wonderfully. And I must renounce it.
After all it is not so much--to renounce a dream. It's no more than
deciding to live. There are big things in the world for men to do."
Melville produced an elaborate conceit. "If there is no Venus
Anadyomene," he said, "there is Michael and his Sword."
"The stern angel in armour! But then he had a good palpable dragon to
slash and not his own desires. And our way nowadays is to do a deal with
the dragons somehow, raise the minimum wage and get a better housing for
the working classes by hook or by crook."
Melville does not think that was a fair treatment of his suggestion.
"No," said Chatteris, "I've no doubt about the choice. I'm going to fall
in--with the species; I'm going to take my place in the ranks in that
great battle for the future which is the meaning of life. I want a moral
cold bath and I mean to take one. This lax dalliance with dreams and
desires must end. I will make a time table for my hours and a rule for
my life, I will entangle my honour in controversies, I will give myself
to service, as a man should do. Clean-handed work, struggle, and
performance."
"And there is Miss Glendower, you know."
"Rather!" said Chatteris, with a faint touch of insincerity. "Tall and
straight-eyed and capable. By Jove! if there's to be no Venus
Anadyomene, at any rate there will be a Pallas Athene. It is she who
plays the reconciler."
And then he said these words: "It won't be so bad, you know."
Melville restrained a movement of impatience, he tells me, at that.
Then Chatteris, he says, broke into a sort of speech. "The case is
tried," he said, "the judgment has been given. I am that I am. I've been
through it all and worked it out. I am a man and I must go a man's way.
There is Desire, the light and guide of the world, a beacon on a
headland blazing out. Let it burn! Let it burn! The road runs near it
and by it--and past.... I've made my choice. I've got to be a man, I've
got to live a man and die a man and carry the burden of my class and
time. There it is! I've had the dream, but you see I keep hold of
reason. Here, with the flame burning, I renounce it. I make my
choice.... Renunciation! Always--renunciation! That is life for all of
us. We have desires, only to deny them, senses that we all must starve.
We can live only as a part of ourselves. Why should _I_ be exempt. For
me, she is evil. For me she is death.... Only why have I seen her face?
Why have I heard her voice?..."
VI
They walked out of the shadows and up a long sloping path until
Sandgate, as a little line of lights, came into view below. Presently
they came out upon the brow and walked together (the band playing with a
remote and sweetening indistinctness far away behind them) towards the
cliff at the end. They stood for a little while in silence looking down.
Melville made a guess at his companion's thoughts.
"Why not come down to-night?" he asked.
"On a night like this!" Chatteris turned about suddenly and regarded the
moonlight and the sea. He stood quite still for a space, and that cold
white radiance gave an illusory strength and decision to his face.
"No," he said at last, and the word was almost a sigh.
"Go down to the girl below there. End the thing. She will be there,
thinking of you----"
"No," said Chatteris, "no."
"It's not ten yet," Melville tried again.
Chatteris thought. "No," he answered, "not to-night. To-morrow, in the
light of everyday.
"I want a good, gray, honest day," he said, "with a south-west wind....
These still, soft nights! How can you expect me to do anything of that
sort to-night?"
And then he murmured as if he found the word a satisfying word to
repeat, "Renunciation."
"By Jove!" he said with the most astonishing transition, "but this is a
night out of fairyland! Look at the lights of those windows below there
and then up--up into this enormous blue of sky. And there, as if it were
fainting with moonlight--shines one star."
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT
I
Just precisely what happened after that has been the most impossible
thing to disinter. I have given all the things that Melville remembered
were said, I have linked them into a conversation and checked them by my
cousin's afterthoughts, and finally I have read the whole thing over to
him. It is of course no verbatim rendering, but it is, he says, closely
after the manner of their talk, the gist was that, and things of that
sort were said. And when he left Chatteris, he fully believed that the
final and conclusive thing was said. And then he says it came into his
head that, apart from and outside this settlement, there still remained
a tangible reality, capable of action, the Sea Lady. What was she going
to do? The thought toppled him back into a web of perplexities again. It
carried him back into a state of inconclusive interrogation past
Lummidge's Hotel.
The two men had gone back to the Métropole and had parted with a firm
handclasp outside the glare of the big doorway. Chatteris went straight
in, Melville fancies, but he is not sure. I understand Melville had
some private thinking to do on his own account, and I conceive him
walking away in a state of profound preoccupation. Afterwards the fact
that the Sea Lady was not to be abolished by renunciations, cropped up
in his mind, and he passed back along the Leas, as I have said. His
inconclusive interrogations elicited at the utmost that Lummidge's
Private and Family Hotel is singularly like any other hotel of its
class. Its windows tell no secrets. And there Melville's narrative ends.
With that my circumstantial record necessarily comes to an end also.
There are sources, of course, and glimpses. Parker refuses,
unhappily--as I explained. The chief of these sources are, first,
Gooch, the valet employed by Chatteris; and, secondly, the hall-porter
of Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel.
The valet's evidence is precise, but has an air of being irrelevant. He
witnesses that at a quarter past eleven he went up to ask Chatteris if
there was anything more to do that night, and found him seated in an
arm-chair before the open window, with his chin upon his hands, staring
at nothing--which, indeed, as Schopenhauer observes in his crowning
passage, is the whole of human life.
"More to do?" said Chatteris.
"Yessir," said the valet.
"Nothing," said Chatteris, "absolutely nothing." And the valet, finding
this answer quite satisfactory, wished him goodnight and departed.
Probably Chatteris remained in this attitude for a considerable
time--half an hour, perhaps, or more. Slowly, it would seem, his mood
underwent a change. At some definite moment it must have been that his
lethargic meditation gave way to a strange activity, to a sort of
hysterical reaction against all his resolves and renunciations. His
first action seems to me grotesque--and grotesquely pathetic. He went
into his dressing-room, and in the morning "his clo'es," said the valet,
"was shied about as though 'e'd lost a ticket." This poor worshipper of
beauty and the dream shaved! He shaved and washed and he brushed his
hair, and, his valet testifies, one of the brushes got "shied" behind
the bed. Even this throwing about of brushes seems to me to have done
little or nothing to palliate his poor human preoccupation with the
toilette. He changed his gray flannels--which suited him very well--for
his white ones, which suited him extremely. He must deliberately and
conscientiously have made himself quite "lovely," as a schoolgirl would
have put it.
And having capped his great "renunciation" by these proceedings, he
seems to have gone straight to Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel and
demanded to see the Sea Lady.
She had retired.
This came from Parker, and was delivered in a chilling manner by the
hall-porter.
Chatteris swore at the hall-porter. "Tell her I'm here," he said.
"She's retired," said the hall-porter with official severity.
"Will you tell her I'm here?" said Chatteris, suddenly white.
"What name, sir?" said the hall-porter, in order, as he explains, "to
avoid a frackass."
"Chatteris. Tell her I must see her now. Do you hear, _now_?"
The hall-porter went to Parker, and came half-way back. He wished to
goodness he was not a hall-porter. The manager had gone out--it was a
stagnant hour. He decided to try Parker again; he raised his voice.
The Sea Lady called to Parker from the inner room. There was an interval
of tension.
I gather that the Sea Lady put on a loose wrap, and the faithful Parker
either carried her or sufficiently helped her from her bedroom to the
couch in the little sitting-room. In the meanwhile the hall-porter
hovered on the stairs, praying for the manager--prayers that went
unanswered--and Chatteris fumed below. Then we have a glimpse of the Sea
Lady.
"I see her just in the crack of the door," said the porter, "as that
maid of hers opened it. She was raised up on her hands, and turned so
towards the door. Looking exactly like this----"
And the hall-porter, who has an Irish type of face, a short nose, long
upper lip, and all the rest of it, and who has also neglected his
dentist, projected his face suddenly, opened his eyes very wide, and
slowly curved his mouth into a fixed smile, and so remained until he
judged the effect on me was complete.
Parker, a little flushed, but resolutely flattening everything to the
quality of the commonplace, emerged upon him suddenly. Miss Waters could
see Mr. Chatteris for a few minutes. She was emphatic with the "Miss
Waters," the more emphatic for all the insurgent stress of the goddess,
protestingly emphatic. And Chatteris went up, white and resolved, to
that smiling expectant presence. No one witnessed their meeting but
Parker--assuredly Parker could not resist seeing that, but Parker is
silent--Parker preserves a silence that rubies could not break.
All I know, is this much from the porter:
"When I said she was up there and would see him," he says, "the way he
rooshed up was outrageous. This is a Private Family Hotel. Of course one
sees things at times even here, but----
"I couldn't find the manager to tell 'im," said the hall-porter. "And
what was _I_ authorised to do?
"For a bit they talked with the door open, and then it was shut. That
maid of hers did it--I lay."
I asked an ignoble question.
"Couldn't ketch a word," said the hall-porter. "Dropped to
whispers--instanter."
II
And afterwards--
It was within ten minutes of one that Parker, conferring an amount of
decorum on the request beyond the power of any other living being,
descended to demand--of all conceivable things--the bath chair!
"I got it," said the hall-porter with inimitable profundity.
And then, having let me realise the fulness of that, he said: "They
never used it!"
"No?"
"No! He carried her down in his arms."
"And out?"
"And out!"
He was difficult to follow in his description of the Sea Lady. She wore
her wrap, it seems, and she was "like a statue"--whatever he may have
meant by that. Certainly not that she was impassive. "Only," said the
porter, "she was alive. One arm was bare, I know, and her hair was down,
a tossing mass of gold.
"He looked, you know, like a man who's screwed himself up.
"She had one hand holding his hair--yes, holding his hair, with her
fingers in among it....
"And when she see my face she threw her head back laughing at me.
"As much as to say, '_got_ 'im!'
"Laughed at me, she did. Bubblin' over."
I stood for a moment conceiving this extraordinary picture. Then a
question occurred to me.
"Did _he_ laugh?" I asked.
"Gord bless you, sir, laugh? _No!_"
III
The definite story ends in the warm light outside Lummidge's Private and
Family Hotel. One sees that bright solitude of the Leas stretching white
and blank--deserted as only a seaside front in the small hours can be
deserted--and all its electric light ablaze. And then the dark line of
the edge where the cliff drops down to the undercliff and sea. And
beyond, moonlit, the Channel and its incessant ships. Outside the front
of the hotel, which is one of a great array of pallid white facades,
stands this little black figure of a hall-porter, staring stupidly into
the warm and luminous mystery of the night that has swallowed Sea Lady
and Chatteris together. And he is the sole living thing in the picture.
There is a little shelter set in the brow of the Leas, wherein, during
the winter season, a string band plays. Close by there are steps that go
down precipitously to the lower road below. Down these it must have been
they went together, hastening downward out of this life of ours to
unknown and inconceivable things. So it is I seem to see them, and
surely though he was not in a laughing mood, there was now no doubt nor
resignation in his face. Assuredly now he had found himself, for a time
at least he was sure of himself, and that at least cannot be misery,
though it lead straight through a few swift strides to death.
They went down through the soft moonlight, tall and white and splendid,
interlocked, with his arms about her, his brow to her white shoulder and
her hair about his face. And she, I suppose, smiled above him and
caressed him and whispered to him. For a moment they must have glowed
under the warm light of the lamp that is half-way down the steps there,
and then the shadows closed about them. He must have crossed the road
with her, through the laced moonlight of the tree shadows, and through
the shrubs and bushes of the undercliff, into the shadeless moon glare
of the beach. There was no one to see that last descent, to tell whether
for a moment he looked back before he waded into the phosphorescence,
and for a little swam with her, and presently swam no longer, and so was
no more to be seen by any one in this gray world of men.
Did he look back, I wonder? They swam together for a little while, the
man and the sea goddess who had come for him, with the sky above them
and the water about them all, warmly filled with the moonlight and set
with shining stars. It was no time for him to think of truth, nor of the
honest duties he had left behind him, as they swam together into the
unknown. And of the end I can only guess and dream. Did there come a
sudden horror upon him at the last, a sudden perception of infinite
error, and was he drawn down, swiftly and terribly, a bubbling
repentance, into those unknown deeps? Or was she tender and wonderful to
the last, and did she wrap her arms about him and draw him down, down
until the soft waters closed above him into a gentle ecstasy of death?
Into these things we cannot pry or follow, and on the margin of the
softly breathing water the story of Chatteris must end. For the
tailpiece to that, let us put that policeman who in the small hours
before dawn came upon the wrap the Sea Lady had been wearing just as
the tide overtook it. It was not the sort of garment low people
sometimes throw away--it was a soft and costly wrap. I seem to see him
perplexed and dubious, wrap in charge over his arm and lantern in hand,
scanning first the white beach and black bushes behind him and then
staring out to sea. It was the inexplicable abandonment of a thoroughly
comfortable and desirable thing.
"What were people up to?" one figures him asking, this simple citizen of
a plain and observed world. "What do such things mean?
"To throw away such an excellent wrap...!"
In all the southward heaven there were only a planet and the sinking
moon, and from his feet a path of quivering light must have started and
run up to the extreme dark edge before him of the sky. Ever and again
the darkness east and west of that glory would be lit by a momentary
gleam of phosphorescence; and far out the lights of ships were shining
bright and yellow. Across its shimmer a black fishing smack was gliding
out of mystery into mystery. Dungeness shone from the west a pin-point
of red light, and in the east the tireless glare of that great beacon on
Gris-nez wheeled athwart the sky and vanished and came again.
I picture the interrogation of his lantern going out for a little way, a
stain of faint pink curiosity upon the mysterious vast serenity of
night.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: A few obvious printer's errors have been silently
corrected. Otherwise spelling, hyphenation, interpunction and grammar
have been preserved as in the original.
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