THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES THE SEA LADY BY THE SAME AUTHOR Love and Mr. Lewisham Tales of Space and Time The Wonderful Visit The Stolen Bacillus, and other Stories The Plattner Story, and others The Wheels of Chance The War of the Worlds The First Men in the Moon The Invisible Man The Time Machine Certain Personal Matters The Discovery of the Future Anticipations THE SEA LADY A TISSUE OF MOONSHINE BY H. G. WELLS METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON 1902 THE CHAPTERS ARE— PAGE I. THE COMING OF THE SEA LADY ... I II. SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS . . . . 30 III. THE EPISODE OF THE VARIOUS JOURNALISTS. 70 IV. THE QUALITY OF PARKER .... 89 V. THE ABSENCE AND RETURN OF MR. HARRY CHATTERIS lOI VI. SYMPTOMATIC 1 33 VII. THE CRISIS 205 VIII. MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT . . . .286 860374 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 2 THE SEA LADY different light. Yet so many people con- cerned themselves with the hushing - up of this affair, that, but for my sedulous enquiries, I am certain it would have become as doubt- ful 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 ob- scurity about the scene of these events. They begin upon the beach just east of Sandgate Castle, towards Folkestone, and they ended on the beach near Folkestone pier, not two miles away. The business began 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 in- SHE ARRIV^ES 3 credible. But of that you may think differ- ently 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 Glen- dower, 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 mind has failed me. I have not ventured to approach them. . . . The villa residences to the east of Sand- gate Castle, you must understand, are particu- larly lucky in having gardens that run right 4 THE SEA LADY 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 lift station at the western end of the Leas, you see them crowding the very marorin. And as a orreat number of hiofh p-roins stand out from the shore alon^ this piece of coast, the beach is practically cut off and made private except at very low water, when people can get round 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 SHE ARRIVES 5 remark, they made no pretence of that sort ; they were quite free (as everybody is in- deed 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 Mrs. Bunting was quite justified in taking in the Gentle- woman and that Mr. Bunting and Fred were sedulous gentlemen, and all their ways and thoughts delicate and nice. And they had staying with them the two Miss Glen- dowers, 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, Antaeus - like, refreshed and enriched. The elder, Adeline, 6 THE SEA LADY 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, she had blossomed at public meetings, and now she was engaged to that really very brilliant SHE ARRIVES 7 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. Some- times 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 discovered long since when they were at school together that it wasn't any 8 THE SEA LADY good trying to be clever when Adeline was about. The Buntings did not bathe " mixed," a thing indeed that was still only very doubt- fully decent in 1898, but Mr. Randolph Bunt- ing 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 fiancde, was of the bathing party.) They formed a little procession 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 SHE ARRIVES 9 bathing dresses and headdresses — though these were 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 round each of her daughters before ever they put a foot in the water, and held it until they were safely out again. But Mabel Glen- dower 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 in- ordinately fond — sat watching the others go on down the beach. There they were, a very 10 THE SEA LADY bright and very pleasant group of prosperous animated people upon the sunlit beach, and beyond them in streaks of green and purple, and altogether calm save for a dainty little pattern of 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 was 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 SHE ARRIVES 11 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 beautifully and that she had a beautiful 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 pre- tending 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. 12 THE SEA LADY 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, SHE ARRIVES 13 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, and she cried in a 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 neigh- bour's ladder out into the water. "Where did she go, Ded ? " said Fred. " Right out hea ! " said Mr. Bunting, and 14 THE SEA LADY to confirm his words there flashed ao^ain an arm and " something dark " — something which in the Hght of all that subsequently happened I am inclined to suppose was an unintentional exposure of the Lady's tail. The two gentlemen are neither of them 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 SHE ARRIVES 15 them had passed ; and it is fairly clear, that while Fred Bunting was engaged in swimmino; hard against the lono- 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 had appeared beside them, and 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, FVed 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. 16 THE SEA LADY " Cramp," she said, " I have cramp." Both the men are 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 II get you in," said Fred, or some- thing 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 77iean 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 — " Try- SHE ARRIVES 17 ing 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 miracle happened. There was a vast swirl of the water like the swirl about a screw pro- peller, 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, so far as back and legs are concerned, beside him, 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. 18 THE SEA LADY 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 dis- ordered 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 he died. 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 he was wiping SHE ARRIVES 19 the water from his eyes, and Mrs. Bunting (except that now and then she really had to turn and say " ^^;2-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 no- body on the beach to claim her. And she 20 THE SEA LADY clung to Fred, and, as Miss Mabel Glen- dower 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. " Vour house," said the Sea Lady, and shut her eyes for good and became oblivious to all further remarks. SHE ARRIVES 21 " 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 was. "Mother," said Nettie, giving words to the general horror. ''Mother. She has a tailV 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." 22 THE SEA LADY 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 23 24 THE SEA LADY 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 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 Bunt- ings 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. No- SHE ARRIVES 25 body 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 Excursion- ists still invisible answered " Pip, Pip." It was evidently a large party. " Anything wrong ? " shouted one of the Low Excursionists at a venture. "My dearV said Mrs. Bunting to Mabel, " what are we to do ? " And in her descrip- 26 THE SEA LADY tion 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 in- volved the most terrible explanations. . . . It was evident there was only one thing to be done. Mrs. Bunting said as much. "The only thing," she said, "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 SHE ARRIVES 27 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 verandah 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, / couldn't tell, you know ! " And then in a dismayed yet curious bunch 28 THE SEA LADY 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 dis- turbed 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 — ("Over- dressed Snobs 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. SHE ARRIVES 29 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 Folke- stone 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 very 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, 30 SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 31 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 ad- mitted as much in several later conversa- tions 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 curiosity, learnt many very in- teresting 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," writes my cousin 32 THE SEA LADY in one of his memoranda, " 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 modi- fication." 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 en- vious 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 suggested to him. 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 SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 33 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 dis- tinct reading public, and additions to that vast submerged library that circulates for- ever with the tides are now pretty system- atically sought. The sources are various and in some cases a little odd. Many books have been found in sunken ships. " Indeed ! " said Melville. " About a book a ship," said the Sea Lady. There is always a drop- ping and blowing overboard of novels and 3 34 THE SEA LADY magazines from most passenger - carrying vessels — sometimes, but these are not as a rule valuable additions — a deliberate shying overboard. 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 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 will not 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, SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 35 when at last they return to their proper place. There is a particularly fine collection of English books, 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 American re- prints 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 givino- 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 36 THE SEA LADY and particularly the fashion papers are valued even more highly than novels, are looked for far more eagerly and perused with envious emotion. Indeed an that point my cousin got a sudden glimpse of one of the motives that had brouo-ht this daring 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 cir- cumstances — how can one hope to keep any- thing 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 ! " SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 37 " 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 ivas 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 auto- matically. . . . But though fiction and fashion appear to be so regrettably dominant in the nourish- ment of the mer-mind, it must not be sup- posed that the most serious side of our read- ing 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 38 THE SEA LADY 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 Encyclopcedia Britannica but also that dense collection of literary snacks and samples, that All- Literature Sausage which has been compressed under the weighty editing (foot in the sack) 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 their gist and has pre- sented it so compactly that almost any business man may take hold of everything in literature now practically without hindrance to his more serious occupations. The un- fortunate 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 SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 39 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 though it was loaded with lead, and its crew and other movables did not follow it down for the better part of the day. The captain was the first to arrive, said the Sea Lady, and it is a curious fact, and 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 40 THE SEA LADY 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 Glen- dower 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 her vehement passion, it is only just to her and 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!" 41 42 THE SEA LADY 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 no lead of human casting will ever plumb. When it is all summed up, SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 43 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 in which the wonderful is the utterly commonplace, we are bred to a quiet freedom from amaze- ment, and why should we boggle at material Mermaids, with Dewars solidifying all sorts of impalpable things and Marconi rays radi- ating 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 her memory remains with them. Ill 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 anti- macassar modestly over her deformity, and 44 SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 45 sometimes looking sweetly down and some- times openly and trustfully into Mrs. Bunt- ing'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 render- ing 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 com- plete excuse for me — for I can understand how exacting your standards must be — at any rate so7ne 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 46 THE SEA LADY Cramp — . But then, Mrs. Bunting" — and here Mrs. Bunting would insert a long im- pressive 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 agfes 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 in- delicacy 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, SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 47 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 though 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 48 THE SEA LADY 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 zve — people who feel deeply — " " Of course," said my cousin Melville, with, I know, a momentary expression of SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 49 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 para- graphs in the silly season, to be made a sort of show of, in fact — . "She doesn't want any of it," said 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 I. And she asks to live with us, to be one of our family, and to learn how we live, to learn to live. She has asked me to advise her what books to read that are really nice, and where she can get a dressmaker, 50 THE SEA LADY 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." " 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 inferred abruptly. " Ample. She told me there was a box — . She said it was moored at the end of a groin, and dear Randolph watched all through lunch - time ; and afterwards, when they could wade out and reach the end of SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 51 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 Wilders ' 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 some- thing — . 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. . . . 52 THE SEA LADY 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 expen- sive, 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 some- thing 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 SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 53 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." 64 SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 55 " And the other young man ? " " You don't mean Mr. Bunting? " "Who is Mr. Bunting?" "The other gentleman who — " " There was no one — " " But several mornings ago ? " "Could it have been Mr. Melville? . . . / know ! You mean Mr. Chatteris ! I remember, he came down with us one morn- ing. 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 ! " 56 THE SEA LADY The Sea Lady was not quite prompt in replying. " What a stupid mistake for me to make ! " she said slowly, and then with more anima- tion, " Of course, now I think, he's much too old to be your son ! " "Well, he's thirty-two!" said Mrs. Bunt- ing with a smile. " It's preposterous." " I won't say that.'' " But I only saw him 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 } " SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 57 "Of course," said Mrs. Bunting. " Very much ? " "Oh — of course. If he wasn't, he wouldn't — " "Of course," said the Sea Lady thought- fully. " 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 pre- cise 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 statistically schedulely things. 58 THE SEA LADY And the Condition of the Poor and all those things. She knows more about the Condi- tion of the Poor than anyone 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. / 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-bookish- ness. . . . " 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 the Sea Lady repeated her question even more carelessly later on. SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 59 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 informa- tion 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 people 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. ^' hi\.^x such a journey," said Mrs. Bunting. There were just the three of them, Adeline Glendower being the third, and Fred and the three other girls, I understand, hung about in a general 60 SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 61 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 for- bidden 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, the three ladies sat and talked as any three ladies all quite resolved to be pleasant to each other would talk. Mrs. Bunting and Miss Glendower were far too well trained in the observances of Good Society (which is, as everyone knows, even the best of it, now extremely Mixed) to make too searching enquiries into the Sea Lady's 62 THE SEA LADY status and way of life, or where precisely 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 in- formation, contenting herself with an enter- taining 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 particu- larly charmed with tea. "And don't you have TeaV 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." SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 63 Mrs. Bunting was in the act of refilling the Sea Lady's cup. " I suppose," she thought suddenly. "As you're not used to it — . It won't affect your diges — ." She orlanced 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 im- pressions. She pierced — for a moment or 64 THE SEA LADY 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 yozir 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 your hand." Mrs. Bunting gave a little coo of approval. SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 65 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 the question of illumination, but it only recurred to Mrs. Bunting- long after. The Sea Lady had turned from Miss Glen- dower'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 faindy 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 5 66 THE SEA LADY hardly know. Like 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 or things of that sort." "Now that's very queer," said Mrs. Bunting, with Miss Glendower's teacup in her hand, absent-mindedly — they were both drinking quite a lot of tea 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 exactly — " And then — " Of course one SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 67 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 sup- position that the sea people also had their '* Problems," and then, it would seem, the natural earnestness of her disposition over- came her proper attitude of ladylike super- ficiality, and she began to ask questions. There can be no doubt 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 de it. One needs to be born a mer-child." 68 THE SEA LADY " 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 w 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 to-day." " What do you wear? " asked Miss Glen- dower. " Very charming things, I expect." " It's a different costume altogether," said the Sea Lady, and brushed away a crumb. SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS 69 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 pro- gramme 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 pres- ently broke out. In spite, moreover, of the fact that one of the maids — they only found out which, long after — told the whole story under vows to her very superior young man, who told it next Sunday to a rising journalist 70 THE JOURNALISTS 71 who was sitting about on the Leas maturing a descriptive article. The rising journalist was incredulous. But he went about enquir- ing. In the end he thought it good enough to go upon. He found in several quarters a vague but sufficient rumour of a some- thing — ; 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 Folke- stone 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 72 THE SEA LADY 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 only fended off 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 THE JOURNALISTS 73 multitude of cameras, the crowds watching the windows, the horrors of a great pubHcity. All the Buntings and Mabel were aghast, simply aghast. Adeline was not so much aghast as excessively annoyed at this im- minent 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 oppor- tunity she retired to her own room. The others, with a certain unusual disregard of her offence, sat round 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,'' said her sister. "It's horrid. I shall go rio-ht off now and have It taken again." " They'll interview the Ded ! " " No, no," said Mr. Bunting, terrified. " Your mother — " 74 THE SEA LADY "It's your place, my dear," said Mrs. Bunting. *' But the Ded— " said Fred. " I couldn't," said Mr. Bunting. " Well, someone '11 have to tell 'em, any- how," 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 directly he arrived, a perfect clamour — an almost ex- ultant clamour, indeed — of shrinking terror. THE JOURNALISTS 75 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 re- porter 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 round the assembled Buntings.) 1& THE SEA LADY " 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 returned together for com- pany, being, so to speak, emergency jour- nalists, compositors in their milder moments, and unaccustomed to these higher aspects of journalism. "What's this about a Mer- maid ? " repeated my cousin, while they waived precedence dumbly one to another. " I believe someone'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 — ." THE JOURNALISTS 77 "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 did. 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. o 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 mer- maid's tail. I've got here — " He displayed sheets. " Whaddyer talking about ? " said Bang- 78 THE JOURNALISTS 79 hurst 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 \i's proved. That note you printed — " "That note I printed was a mistake if there's anything of thai 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 ! " ''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 80 THE SEA LADY 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 con- founded beach was littered with mermaids. — Not the Whole Confounded 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 whad 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 — Any- body. 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 THE JOURNALISTS 81 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 they 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 Cafe. 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. 82 THE SEA LADY It's a beastly lot of copy, you know, to get slumped." "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. Ill It must have been quite soon after that that I myself heard the first mention of the mermaid, Httle recking that at last it would fall to me to write her history. I was on one of my rare visits to London, and Mickle- thwaite 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 though he expected some- one who never came. Once distinctly I saw him beckon to a man, but the man did not respond. 63 84 THE SEA LADY " Look here, MIcklethwalte," 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 conversa- tion with someone, and that a kind of Taboo — " Micklethwaite stared over his fork. " 'Rs.-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 THE JOURNALISTS 85 and then poured himself wine — splashing the tablecloth. "He had 7ne for an hour very nearly the other day." "Yes?" I said. " Silly /^^/," said Micklethwaite. I was afraid it was all over, but luckily he gave me an opening again after gulping down his wine. " He gets 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 Folke- stone." "He says there is one ? " 86 THE SEA LADY " Ves, 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 his apoplexy then, but hap- pily 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 Mickle- thwaite 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 was Mrs. Bunting I should break off at this point and raise my eyebrows and both hands, to indicate how golf acts on Mickle- thwaite 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 THE JOURNALISTS 87 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. 88 THE SEA LADY 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 con- siderable 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 89 90 THE SEA LADY 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 under- stood — 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 pre- varication may go — would be as well as ever. "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 im- 91 92 THE SEA LADY partiality 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 any- thing 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 ex- perience. 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 didnt, Mem," replied Parker respect- THE QUALITY OF PARKER 93 fully, and evidently quite willing to under- stand 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 Ser- vants — " "The Lower Servants — No, Mem." "You understand?" and Mrs. Bunting looked up again and regarded Parker calmly. " Precisely, Mem!" said Parker, with a face 94 THE SEA LADY 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 THE QUALITY OF PARKER 95 (with an air of Tightness 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 but 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 but 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 96 THE SEA LADY 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 Wilders " by a jewel case, a dressing bag, and the first of the Sea Lady's trunks. On a thousand litde occasions this Parker showed a sense of propriety that was pene- tratingly 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—!" THE QUALITY OF PARKER 97 " I think, Mem, she should have stock- ings," 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. Ill Let me add here regretfully, but with In- finite 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 High ton 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 has scarcely a crumb to go upon. And, from first to last, what she must have seen and learnt and inferred must amount practically to everything. I put as much to her frankly. She made 98 THE QUALITY OF PAUKER 99 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 «// 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. 100 THE SEA LADY " 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, how- ever, 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 Bunt- ings ceased to be altogether focussed upon this new and amazing social addition, they — 101 102 THE SEA LADY of all people — had most indisputably dis- covered 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 elec- tioneering. »> MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 103 " But do you think she — " " She will be dreadfully in the way." She added after an interval, " She stops my working." " But, my dear 1 " " 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 pros- pects. 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, helpr " She might canvass. She's very attrac- tive, 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 everyone who can do anything must be let do it. Cut them — do 104 THE SEA LADY 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. / 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 dearV said Mrs. Bunting. " I wouldn't have her canvassing with us MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 105 for anything^' said Miss Glendower. " She'd spoil everything. She is frivolous — and satirical. She looks at yoii with incredulous eyes, she seems to blight all one's earnest- ness. ... 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 ! Ive 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 — " 106 THE SEA LADY "My dearV 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 7ww,'' 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 anyone who hasnt a soul and who is trying to find one — " MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 107 " 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 though 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 / 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. 108 THE SEA LADY •' 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 — anyone. 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 litde 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 ideas and establish ideas. Harry has views, new views, and wide-reaching ones. We want to put our whole strength into this work. Now especially. And her presence — " MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 109 She paused for a moment. " It is a digression. She diverts things. She puts it all wrong. She has a way of concentrating attention upon 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 lunch table, and Adeline's behaviour to the Sea Lady and Mrs. Bunting was as pleasant and alert as any highly earnest and intellectual young lady's could be. And all that Mrs. no THE SEA LADY 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, 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 out with him ; and his uncle, the Earl of 111 112 THE SEA LADY Beechcroft, settled some of his bills. Not all — for the family is commendably free from sentimental excesses — but enough to get him comfortable again. The family is not a rich one, and it further abounds in an extraordinary quantity of rather frowsy, loose - tongued, income - drawing aunts — I never knew a family quite so rich in odd aunts. But Chatteris was so good- looking, easy - mannered and gifted, that they seemed to agree almost without dis- cussion to pull him through. They hunted about for something that would be really remunerative without being laborious or too commercial, and meanwhile — after the extra- ordinary 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 MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 113 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 suggests 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. 8 114 THE SEA LADY He came back unmarried — and via 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 seems to have been the daughter of a millionaire and something like an engage- ment 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 someone else, whom the A^. Y. Y. inter- viewed or professed to interview under the heading AN ARISTOCRATIC BRITISHER TRIFLES WITH A PURE AMERICAN GIRL. INTERVIEW WITH THE VICTIM OF HIS HEARTLESS LEVITY. MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 115 But this someone else was, I am inclined to think in spite of her excellently executed portrait, merely a brilliant stroke of modern journalism, the A^. V. Y. having got wind of the sudden retreat of Chatteris and invented 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 breakfast 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 a somewhat 116 THE SEA LADY diminished glory and a series of letters on Imperial Affairs, each headed with the quo- tation, "What do they know of England who only England know ? " Of course people in England learnt nothing of the real circumstances of the case, but it was fairly obvious 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 Inspira- tion 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 MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 117 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 everyone was expecting him daily, including, it is now indisputable, the Sea Lady. Ill 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 M^tropole, the Bunting house being full and the Mctropole being the nearest hotel to Sandgate, and he walked down in the after- noon and asked for Adeline, which was pretty rather than correct. I gather 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 closed door as this and give you all that 118 MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 119 these persons said and did. 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 daine'' 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 120 THE SEA LADY 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 the incar- nation of Marcella. It was he had perverted Mrs. Bunting to this view. 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 arro- gant benevolence, that same obtuseness to MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 121 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 con- scientious and conscious integrity, a hard nobility without one touch of magic, an in- dustrious thoroughness. More than anything else, Adeline delighted in her novelist's thoroughness, her freedom from impression- ism, the patient resolution with which she went into the corners and swept under the mat of every incident. And so it would be easy to argue from that that Adeline behaved as Mrs. Ward's most characteristic heroine behaved, on a very 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 122 THE SEA LADY "receded with a quick movement" and listened "with her beautiful hand pen- sive 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 con- stant 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 op- portunity of becoming Maxwell he would probably have rejected it with extreme MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 123 incivility. So they met like two unheroic human beings, with shy and clumsy move- ments 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 124 THE SEA LADY facts, I fancy that for such a couple as these 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 seems to have been the first to see them. " Here he is," she said abruptly. "Who is?" said Mrs. Bunting, glancing up at eyes that were suddenly eager and then by their direction to Chatteris. "Your other Son," said the Sea Lady, jesting unheeded. "It's Harry and Adeline!" cried Mrs. Bunting. "Don't they make a Couple?" But the Sea Lady made no reply, and leant back scrutinising their advance. Certainly they made a couple. Coming out of the verandah 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 MR. HxVRRY CHATTERIS 125 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, tallish — though not so tall as Marcella seems to have been — and, you know, without any instructions from any novel in the world — glad. Chatteris did not discover that there was anyone 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 debut, 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 126 THE SEA LADY 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 exhi- bition 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 prob- ably saw now closely for the first time. One wonders whether it is just possible MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 127 that there may have been something, if it was 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 locking 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 wel- come 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.'*" 128 THE SEA LADY "How's the fishing?" said Harry. And so they came into a vague circle about this lovely person who had "won them all " — except Parker, of course, who remained in her own proper place, and is 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 them, like a leading lady when the other actors have forgotten their parts. Then everyone woke up as it were to this, 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 j^z£/ Him then?" and Fred flung "Hooray!" into the tangle of sounds. MR. HARRY CHATTERIS 129 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 will do more than that," said Adeline. •'Oh jj/^^!"said Betty Bunting, ''we will." "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 9 130 THE SEA LADY 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 seem to have neither flesh nor bones inside them but only sawdust or horse -hair. Mrs. Buntinof leant 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 involve Chatteris by a tactful interposition. But Chatteris appeared disinclined to be involved. He INIR. HARRY CHATTERIS 131 seemed indeed quite interested in Mr. Bunting's view of the case. Presently the croquet foursome went back — at Mabel's suggestion — to that employ- ment, 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 burthen 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 conscious- ness 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 132 THE SEA LADY 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, and 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 furtive 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 133 134 THE SEA LADY just under the brow which give such a pleasant and characteristic charm to Folke- stone 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 he 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 way off, 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-chair man was crumpled up against the bank lost in that wistful melancholy that the constant perambulation of broken humanity necessarily engenders. My cousin slackened his pace a little and came up and joined them. The conversa- tion hung at his approach. Chatteris sat SYMPTOMATIC 135 back, but there seemed no resentment, and he sought a topic for the three of them 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 though he saw the jest. There was a little pause. "You are contesting Hythe?" said Melville. " Fate points that way," said Chatteris. "They threaten a dissolution for Sep- tember." " It will come in a month," said Chatteris, with the inimitable note of one who knows. " In that case we shall soon be busy." " And / may canvass ?" said the Sea Lady. " I never have — " 136 THE SEA LADY "Miss Waters," explained Chatteris, "has been telHng 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 encouragement." " I could go round 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 ? " SYMPTOMATIC 137 '' 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 smug- gling — forty years ago. Really, I doubt if there ever was any smuggling. The exist- ing coastgu-ard 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. 138 THE SEA LADY " In a paper," he suggested. "Yes, in a paper," she said, seizing the rope he threw her. "That?" asked Chatteris. "There is smuggHng still," said the Sea Lady, with an air of someone 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 shan'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. SYMPTOMATIC 139 My cousin was reminded of an anec- dote. . . . 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 140 THE SEA LADY 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 get her ? " My cousin had to gather himself together for a second or so. "There's something — " he said de- liberately, "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 SYMPTOMATIC 141 treatinof women. He likes women to be finite — and nice. In fact he likes everything to be finite — and nice. So he grunted merely. 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 142 THE SEA LADY 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." " //e ought to know." " I'm not so sure of that. You don't happen to know the nature of her disable- ment ? " "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 Metropole 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. SYMPTOMATIC 143 " How ? " " This canvassing. She can't be interested in Philanthropic Liberalism." "There's a difference in the type. And besides, there 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 knowr " Besides, it's not a question of principles. It's the fun of electioneering." " Fun ! " ** There's no knowing what wont interest the feminine mind," said Melville, and added, **or what will." Chatteris did not answer. *' It's the District Visiting Instinct, I expect," 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 gave way to 144 THE SEA LADY 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 re- proachfully, yet with 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 de- tails 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 (as everyone was ac- customed to do) Parker, who was in a garden - chair doing some afternoon work at a proper distance — there was nobody with them at all. Fred and the ofirls were out cycling — Fred had gone with them at the Sea Lady's request — and Miss Glendower and Mrs. Buntino- were at Hythe calling diplomatically on some rather horrid local people who might be service- able to Harry in his electioneering. Mr. Bunting was out fishing. He was not fond of fishing, but he was in many 10 146 THE SEA LADY respects an exceptionally resolute little man, and he had taken to fishing every day in the afternoon after lunch in order to break himself off what Mrs. Bunting called his "ridiculous habit" of getting sea-sick when- ever he went out in a boat. He said that if fishing from a boat with pieces of mussels for bait after lunch would not break the habit, nothing would ; and certainly it seemed at times as though it was going to break everything that was in him. But the habit escaped. This, however, is a digres- sion. 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 veri- SYMPTOMATIC 147 similitude 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 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 learnt." 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 148 THE SEA LADY 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 ampli- fied, " 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 disposition 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 SYMPTOMATIC 149 tangent now as he was sitting forward and scrutinising her first very creditable efforts to draw. " I just wonder," he said, " what exactly 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 though 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. 150 THE SEA LADY "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, yozc know." -What.?" " You know I' said Melville, and would not look at her. " I decline to know," she said after a little pause. " Besides — " he said. "Yes?" SYMPTOMATIC 151 " 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 my cousin, and knocked an imaginary ash from his extinct cigarette. "A soul, " he repeated, and glanced at Parker. " A soul, you know," he said, 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 Anyone," said my cousin Melville, suddenly admitting his difficulty. 152 THE SEA LADY 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, t^ere ! " 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 ? " " Everyone." " Except me ?" " I'm not certain of that." "Mrs. Buntina?" " Certainly." "And Mr. Bunting.?" " Everyone." " Has Miss Glendower?" SYMPTOMATIC 153 '« 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 sud- denly 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 down- cast, trying to find a way towards whatever it was that it 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 154 THE SEA LADY she had hung on the 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 one another with an un- precedented intimacy. Melville was suddenly direct. It was a discovery that it seemed he ought to have made all along. He felt quite unaccountably bitter, and 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, / don't." He changed his note. " But I will if you wish it." " I thought you would." " O\\,you know," said Melville, discovering his extinct cigarette was within reach of a vindictive heel. SYMPTOMATIC 155 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." 156 THE SEA LADY "/5 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 ivant to know." Melville looked her in the eyes again. " You know you're not playing fair," he said. -To her?" "To anyone." ''Why?" " Because you are immortal — and unen- cumbered. 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 SYMPTOMATIC 157 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 ele- ments, 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 musi 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 — " 158 THE SEA LADY "You watch us ?" " Oh yes. We watch you, and sometimes we envy you. Not only for the dry air and the sunHeht and the shadows of trees and the feeUng 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 SYMPTOMATIC 159 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 pre- posterous things. Why are they bound ? Why are they letting life slip by them ? Just as though they wouldn't all of them presently be dead ! Suppose yoti were to go up there in a bathing dress and a white cotton hat — " " It wouldn't h^ properV cried Melville. ♦'Why not?" " It would be outrageous ! " ** But anyone 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 160 THE SEA LADY other day dreadfully worried by a spot of ink on your sleeve — almost the whole afternoon." My cousin looked distressed. She aban- doned 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 undertones, as one who imparts a secret that is not to be too lightly given. "Because," she said, ''there are better dreams ." Ill 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 leant 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. II 162 THE SEA LADY *' 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." She spoke on my cousin's silence. "She's not r^«/," she said. " 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 per- petually 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 SYMPTOMATIC 163 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 pro- minently 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 164 THE SEA LADY a man rather divided against himself." He added abruptly, "We all are." He re- covered 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 SYMPTOMATIC 165 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 anyone 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 like 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 166 THE SEA LADY intend to keep up the game to that extent. You don't mean to — positively, in our ter- restrial fashion, you know — 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 shan'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 SYMPTOMATIC 167 then, you know — . . . ." Her voice sank to a low whisper. " There are better dreams^ "^//^/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 cessation, and she was looking at the house. 168 THE SEA LADY "Do . . . rt'sl Do . . . risl Are you there?" It was Mrs. Bunting's voice float- ing athwart the lawn, the voice of the ascendant present, of invincibly sensible things. The world grew real again to Mel- ville. He seemed to wake up, to start back from some delusive trance that crept upon him. He looked at the Sea Lady as though he was already incredulous of the things they had said, as though he had been asleep and dreamt their talk. Some light seemed to go out, some fancy faded. His eye rested upon the inscription, " Flamps, Bath - Chair Pro- prietor," 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. SYMPTOMATIC 169 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 arti- ficially easy smile, " What have we been talking about ? " "All sorts of things, I daresay," 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. 170 THE SEA I.ADY My cousin caught all this 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 though 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 remem- bered sentence and then that. Had she really said this thing and quite in this way ? Had she really said that ? His memory of 171 172 THE SEA LADY their conversation was never quite the same for two days together. Had she really and deliberately foreshadowed for Chatteris some obscure and mystical sub- mergence ? . . . 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 exactly 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 there arose presently quite a new set of doubts, as though he was not already sufficiently equipped. The Sea Lady, he reflected, 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 SYMPTOMATIC 173 Miss Glendower, to the Buntings or anyone, 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 seems to have hovered about the house on the Sandgate Riviera to a scandalous extent, 174 THE SEA LADY failing always to get a sufficiently long and intimate tHe-a-tete with the Sea Lady to settle once for all his doubts as to what really had been said and what he had dreamt 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 burthen of his private mutterings. His condition was palpable even to Mrs. Bunting. But she misunderstood his motive. 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 though there had never been anything. . . . I suppose one may contrive to under- stand something of his disturbance. He SYMPTOMATIC 175 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 illumina- tion from the passive invalid — if Mrs. Bunting one morning had not very tactfully hinted — You know Mrs. Bunting, and you can imagine what she tactfully hinted. Just at 176 THE SEA LADY 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 im- mortal with a scaly tail seems to have seemed to her the most natural thing" in the world. Apropos of nothing whatever I fancy she remarked, " Your opportunity's 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 SYMPTOMATIC 177 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 bedroom of his and round 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 12 178 THE SEA LADY 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 trans- parence 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 cries, "if these dreams are for Chatteris, why should she tell me ? " Suppose I had the chance of them — whatever they are — " He reflects, with a terrible sincerity in the nature of his will. " No ! " And then again, " No ! "And if one mustn't have 'em, why SYMPTOMATIC 179 should one know about 'em and be worried by them ? . . . " If she comes to do mischief, why shouldn't she do mischief without makine 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 lunch, 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 participa- 180 THE SEA LADY tion the good waiter shows to such as he esteems. I figure the respectful pause, the respectful enquiry. "Oh, anythiiigV cries Melville, and the waiter retires amazed. V To add to Melville's distress, as petty dis- comforts do add to all genuine trouble, his club was undergoing an operation, and 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 any- thing 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 disloca- tion of his world that brought him unex- o 181 182 THE SEA LADY pectedly 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. Melville had taken up Punch — he was in that mood when a man takes up anything — and was reading, he does not know exactly what he was reading. 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. SYMPTO^IATIC 183 " 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's doubtful whether I shall contest Hythe," he remarked. -No?" "No." He lit his cigrarette. " 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. Everyone's at work. Miss Glendower — " " I know," said Chatteris. 184 THE SEA LADY " 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 litde immoderate with your statistics," said Melville. Chatteris said something that struck Mel- ville as having somehow been said before. "Election, Progress, Good of Humanity, Public Spirit ; — none of these things interest me really," he said. "At least — ^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 SYMPTOMATIC 185 keep on shoving you at that. They form your character. They build your mind. They rush you into it. . . ." "They didn't me," said Melville. *' They did 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 con- founded committees of confounded tradesmen whose sole idea in this world is to get over- paid for their self-respect ; you whisper and hobnob with local solicitors and get yourself seen about with them ; you ass 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 186 THE SEA LADY 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. — That there was to be something more than party politics and self-advancement — } " He left his sentence interrogatively in- complete. " The Condition of the Poor," he said. " Well ? " said Chatteris, and regarded him with a sort of stony admission in his blue eye. Melville dodged the eye. " At Sandgate," he said, "there was, you know, a certain atmosphere of Belief — " SYMPTOMATIC 187 " 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 play- ing, 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 in 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 188 THE SEA LADY 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 in- triguing 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 SYMPTOMATIC 189 to it, square myself down in my chair, you know, and say, ' Now for the rest of my life this is IT, this is your life, Chatteris,' — when I do that, there comes a sort of terror, Melville." " H'm," said Melville, and meditated. 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 faced about towards his interlocutor, and toyed with a club ash-tray. " It's Every Day has overtaken you," he said. " You can't seethe 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." 190 THE SEA LADY " 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, 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 got. "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 — ? " SYMPTOMATIC 191 " It's out of the question," said Chatteris. He added, rather remarkably, " AdeHne'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 mawbici nowadays to doubt for a moment the absolute final all-this-and-nothing-else-in-the-worldish- ness 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?" 192 THE SEA LADY " Been fishing." " Of course. Breezes and the spring tides. . . . And Miss Waters ? " Chatteris shot a suspicious glance at him. He affected the offhand style. " Skes 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?" SYMPTOMATIC 193 "How should / know?" prevaricated Melville. "Well, you do know. And the others know. Who is she ? " Melville met his eyes. "Won't they tell you ?" he said. " 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," he said. " I don't care if she has." There came a pause. " Look here, Melville," said Chatteris, 13 194 THE SEA LADY " 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 ? Con- found it! I'm asking you plainly enough." " Well," said Melville, and at the moment he had really decided to tell Chatteris. But he hung up on 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 SYMPTOMATIC 195 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 I It seemed impossible. The breathing of an eminent person in a chair in the far corner became 196 THE SEA LADY 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 in- vitation of its expanded arms that man does not live by bread alone — inasmuch as after- wards he needs a nap. An utterly dreamless chair ! Mermaids? He felt he was after all quite possibly the victim of a foolish delusion, hypnotised by Mrs. Bunting's beliefs. Was there not some SYMPTOMATIC 197 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 mas- sively 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 his ineffectual hand. I fancy he ended by failing to find a thing sufficiently regret- table to express the pungency of the moment. He flung about and went towards the door. " Don't ! " he said to the back of the news- paper of the breathing member. " If you don't want to," he said to the respectful waiter at the door. 198 THE SEA LADY The hall porter heard that he didn't care — he was hanged 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 Melville. 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 apologetic quality of demeanour would 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 indig- 199 200 THE SEA LADY nation, 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 un- reasonable outbreak altered all the per- spectives 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 unspoken discourse in his mind. Was there ever a more ungracious, un- grateful, unreasonable creature than this same Chatteris ? He was the spoilt child of Fortune, things came to him, things were given 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 SYMPTOMATIC 201 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 thank- less 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 the many who suffer from hunger, who lead lives of unremitting toil, who go fearful, who go squalid, and withal do, 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 202 THE SEA LADY 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 wife, 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 imagina- tion, 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 round by the Serpentine to his home. SYMPTOMATIC 203 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 fusilading fire in his flat, to smoke one sound cigar before he went to bed, "No," he said suddenly, "I am not maivbid 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, an impossible, extravagant discontent. What does he dream of? . . . Three parts he is dreamer, and the fourth part — spoilt child. " Dreamer . . . " Other dreams. . . . 204 THE SEA LADY " What other dreams could she mean ? " . . . My cousin fell into profound musings, . . . My cousin 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 — 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 in- terested, keenly observant, and his more than average memory took some excellent im- pressions. 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 206 206 THE SEA LADY 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. P/^^ laugh?" I asked. " Gord bless you, Sir — laugh ! No ! " Ill The definite story ends in the warm ^ight 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 liofht ablaze. And then the dark line of the edc^e where the cliff drops down to the under-cli/f 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. MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT 297 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 moon- light, 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 298 THE SEA LADY 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 moon- light of the tree shadows, and through the shrubs and bushes of the under-cliff, 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 pres- ently swam no longer, and so was no more to be seen by anyone in this grey world of men. Did he look back, I wonder ? They swam toeether 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 the glamour of phosphorescent things. It was no time for him to think of truth, nor of the honest duties he had left behind MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT 299 him, as they swam together into the un- known. 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, down 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 some- times throw away — it was a soft and costly wrap. I seem to see him perplexed and 300 THE SEA JLADY 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 are people up to ? " one figures him asking, this simple citizen of a plain and obvious 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 ran 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 phos- phorescence ; and far out the lights of ships were shining bright and yellow. Across its shimmer a black fishing smack was gliding MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT 301 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 PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTMITBD, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. w MOV ^0^9^^ F 315 •p^V- 3 1158 00786 1197 UC SOUTHERrj REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 367 328