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/<?^5^," was the 
 irresistible message from Mrs. Bunting. My 
 cousin took the early train and arrived at 
 Sandgate in the forenoon. 
 
 Mrs. Bunting, he gathered, was upstairs 
 with Miss Glendower, and implored him to 
 wait until she could leave her charge. ** Miss 
 Glendower not well, then } " said Melville. 
 " No, Sir, not at all well," said the housemaid, 
 and evidently awaited a further question. 
 " Where are the others ? " he asked casually. 
 The three younger young ladies had gone to 
 Hythe, said the housemaid, with a marked
 
 THE CRISIS . 207 
 
 omission of the Sea Lady. Melville has an 
 intense dislike of questioning servants on 
 points at issue, so he asked nothing at all 
 concerning Miss Waters. This general 
 absence of people from the room of familiar 
 occupation was entirely in the same vein of 
 crisis as the telegram. The housemaid 
 waited a further instant and withdrew. 
 
 He stood for a moment in the drawing- 
 room, and then walked out upon the veran- 
 dah. He perceived a richly caparisoned 
 figure advancing towards him. It was 
 Fred Bunting. He had been taking advan- 
 tage of the general desertion of home to 
 bathe from the house. He was wearing an 
 umbrageous white cotton hat and a striped 
 blanket, and a more aggressively manly pipe 
 than any fully adult male would ever dream 
 of smoking, hung from the corner of his 
 mouth. 
 
 ** Hello!" he said. "The Mate send for 
 you .'*
 
 208 THE SEA LADY 
 
 Melville admitted the truth of this theory. 
 
 " There's Ructions," said Fred, and re- 
 moved the pipe. The act offered conversa- 
 tion. 
 
 "Where's Miss Waters?" 
 
 " Gone." 
 
 "Back?" 
 
 "Lord — No I Catch her! She's gone to 
 Lummidge's Hotel. With her maid. Took 
 a suite." 
 
 "Why—" 
 
 " The Mate made a row with her." 
 
 " Whatever for ? " 
 
 " Harry." 
 
 My cousin stared at the situation. 
 
 " It broke out," said Fred. 
 
 " WhathxoV^ out?" 
 
 "The row. Harry's gone daft on her, 
 Addy says." 
 
 "On Miss Waters?" 
 
 " Rather. Mooney. Didn't care for his 
 electioneering — didn't care for his ordny
 
 THE CRISIS 209 
 
 nusment. Loose ends. Didn't mention it 
 to Adeline, but she began to see it. Asked 
 questions. Next day, went off. London. 
 She asked what was up. Three days' silence. 
 Then — . Wrote to her." 
 
 Fred intensified all this by raising his eye- 
 brows, pulling down the corners of his mouth, 
 and nodding portentously. " Eh ? " he en- 
 quired ; and then, to make things clearer : 
 "Wrote a letter." 
 
 " He didn't write to her about Miss 
 Waters ? " 
 
 " Don't know what he wrote about. Don't 
 suppose he mentioned her name, but I dare- 
 say he made it clear enough. All I know is, 
 that everything in the house felt like elastic 
 pulled tighter than it ought to be for two 
 whole days — everybody in a sort of compli- 
 cated twist — and then there was a snap. All 
 that time Addy was writing letters to him 
 and tearing 'em up, and no one could quite 
 
 make it out. Everyone looked blue except 
 14
 
 210 THE SEA LADY 
 
 Miss Waters. She kept her own lovely- 
 pink. And at the end of that time the Mate 
 began asking things, Adeline chucked writing, 
 gave the Mate half a hint, Mate took it all 
 in an instant, and the thing burst." 
 
 " Miss Glendower didn't—? " 
 
 " No, the Mate did. Put it pretty straight 
 too — as the Mate can. . . . She didn't deny 
 it. Said she couldn't help herself, and that 
 he was as much hers as Adeline's. I heard 
 that," said Fred shamelessly. " Pretty thick, 
 eh ?— considering he's engaged. And the 
 Mate gave it her pretty straight. Said 
 ' I've been very much deceived in you, Miss 
 Waters — very much indeed.' I heard 
 her. . . ." 
 
 "And then?" 
 
 " Asked her to go. Said she'd requited 
 us ill for taking her up when nobody but a 
 fisherman would have looked at her." 
 
 "She said thaO. " 
 
 " Well, words to that effect."
 
 THE CRISIS 211 
 
 "And Miss Waters went?" 
 
 " In a first-class cab, maid and boxes in 
 another, all complete. Perfect lady. . . . 
 Couldn't have believed if I hadn't seen it — 
 the tail I mean." 
 
 "And Miss Glendower?" 
 
 " Addy ? Oh, she's been going it. Comes 
 downstairs and does the pale-faced heroine, 
 and goes upstairs and does the broken- 
 hearted part. / know. It's all very well. 
 You never had sisters. You know — " 
 
 Fred held his pipe elaborately out of the 
 way and protruded his face to a confidential 
 nearness. 
 
 " I believe they half like it," said Fred in 
 a confidential half- whisper. "Such a Go, 
 you know. Mabel pretty near as bad. And 
 the girls. All making the very most they 
 can of it. You'd think Chatteris was the only 
 man alive, to hear 'em. / couldn't get up 
 emotion like they do, if my feet was being 
 flayed. Cheerful home, eh? For holidays."
 
 212 THE SEA LADY 
 
 ' * Where's — the Principal Gentleman ? " 
 asked Melville, a little grimly. " In 
 London ? " 
 
 " Unprincipled gentleman / call him," said 
 Fred. "He's stopping down here at the 
 MStropole. S tuck. 
 
 ' ' Down here ? Stuck ? " 
 
 " Rather. Stuck and set about." 
 
 My cousin tried for sidelights. "What's 
 his attitude ? " he asked. 
 
 ''Slump" said Fred with intensity. 
 
 " This little Blow Off has rather astonished 
 him," he explained. "When he wrote to 
 say that the election didn't interest him for 
 a bit, but he hoped to pull round — " 
 
 " You said you didn't know what he 
 
 wrote." 
 
 " I do that much," said Fred. " He no 
 more thought they'd have spotted it meant 
 Miss Waters than a baby. But women are 
 so thundering sharp, you know. They're 
 born spotters. How it'll all end — "
 
 THE CRISIS 213 
 
 " But why has he come to the Mdtro- 
 pole ? " 
 
 "Middle of the stage, I suppose," said 
 Fred. 
 
 •' What's his attitude ? " 
 
 " Says he's going to see AdeHne and 
 explain everything — and doesn't do it. . . . 
 Puts it off. And Adeline, so far as I can 
 gather, says that if he doesn't come down 
 soon, she's hanged if she'll see him, much as 
 her heart may be broken and all that if she 
 doesn't. You know." 
 
 " Naturally," said Melville, rather incon- 
 secutively. " And he doesn't ? " 
 
 " Doesn't stir." 
 
 " Does he see — the other lady ? " 
 
 "We don't know. We can't ivatch him. 
 But if he does he's clever — " 
 
 " There's about a hundred blessed relatives 
 of his in the place — came like crows for a 
 corpse. I never saw such a lot. Talk about
 
 214 THE SEA LADY 
 
 a man of good old family — it's decaying ! I 
 never saw such a high old family in my life. 
 Aunts they are chiefly." 
 
 "Aunts?" 
 
 "Aunts. Say they've rallied round him. 
 How they got hold of it I don't know. 
 Like vultures. Unless the Mate — . 
 But they're here. They're all at him — 
 using their influence with him, threatening 
 to cut off legacies and all that. There's 
 one old girl at Bate's, Lady Poynting 
 Mallow — least bit horsey but about as all 
 right as any of 'em — who's been down 
 here twice. Seems a trifle disappointed in 
 Adeline. And there's two Aunts at 
 Wampach's — you know the sort that stop 
 at Wampach's — regular hothouse flowers — 
 a watering-potful of real icy cold water 
 would kill both of 'em. And there's one 
 come over from the Continent — short hair, 
 short skirts — regular terror — she's at the 
 Pavilion. They're all chasing round.
 
 THE CRISIS 215 
 
 'Where is this woman?' sort of thinof. 
 ' Lemme peck ! ' " 
 
 "That the hundred?" 
 
 " Practically. The Wampachers are 
 sending for a Bishop who used to be his 
 schoolmaster — " 
 
 " No stone unturned, eh ? " 
 
 "None." 
 
 " And has he found out yet — " 
 
 " That she's a mermaid. I don't believe 
 he has. The Pate went up to tell him. 
 Of course he was a bit out of breath and 
 embarrassed. And Chatteris cut him 
 down. 'At least let me hear nothing 
 against her,' he said. And the Pate 
 took that and came away. Good old 
 Pater. Eh?" 
 
 "And the Aunts?" 
 
 " They're taking it in. Mainly they 
 grasp the fact that he's going to jilt Adeline, 
 just as he jilted the American girl. The 
 mermaid side they seem to boggle at. Old
 
 216 THE SEA LADY 
 
 people like that don't take to a new idea all 
 at once. The Wampach ones are shocked 
 — but curious. They don't believe for a 
 moment she really is a mermaid, but they 
 want to know all about it. And the one 
 down at the Pavilion simply said, ' Bosh ! 
 How can she breathe under water? Tell 
 me that, Mrs. Bunting. She's some sort 
 of person you have picked up, I don't know 
 how, but mermaid she cannot be.' They'd 
 be all tremendously down on the Mate, I 
 think, for picking her up, if it wasn't that 
 tney can't do without her help to bring 
 Addy round again. Pretty mess all round, 
 eh ? " 
 
 " I suppose the Aunts will tell him ? " 
 
 "What?" 
 
 " About the tail." 
 
 " I suppose they will." 
 
 •' And what then ? " 
 
 "Heaven knows! Just as likely they 
 won t.
 
 THE CRISIS 217 
 
 My cousin meditated on the verandah 
 tiles for a space. 
 
 " It amuses me," said Fred Bunting. 
 
 " Look here," said my cousin Melville. 
 "What am I supposed to do? Why have 
 I been asked to come ? " 
 
 "/don't know. Stir it up a bit, I expect. 
 Everybody do a bit — like the Christmas 
 pudding." 
 
 " But—" said Melville. 
 
 "I've been bathing," said Fred. "No- 
 body asked me to take a hand, and I didn't. 
 It won't be a good pudding without me, 
 but there you are ! There's only one thing 
 / can see to do — " 
 
 "It might be the right thing. What is 
 it?" 
 
 " Punch Chatteris' head." 
 
 " I don't see that would help matters." 
 
 "Oh, it wouldn't help matters," said Fred, 
 and added with an air of conclusiveness, 
 "There it is!" Then, adjusting the folds of
 
 218 THE SEA LADY 
 
 his blanket to a greater dignity and replac- 
 ing his long extinct large pipe between his 
 teeth, he went on his way. The tail of 
 his blanket followed him reluctantly round 
 the door. His bare feet padded across 
 the hall and became inaudible on the 
 carpet of the stairs. 
 
 "Fred!" said Melville, going doorward 
 with a sudden after - thought for fuller 
 particulars. 
 
 But Fred had gone.
 
 II 
 
 Instead Mrs. Bunting appeared. Her face 
 showed traces of recent emotion. 
 
 " I telegraphed," she said. " We are in 
 dreadful trouble." 
 
 "Miss Waters, I gather — " 
 
 " She's gone." 
 
 She went towards the bell and stopped. 
 "They'll get lunch as usual," she said. 
 "You will be wanting your lunch." 
 
 She came towards him with rising hands. 
 " You can not imagine," she said. " That 
 poor child ! " 
 
 "You must tell me," said Melville. 
 
 " I simply do not know what to do. I 
 don't know where to turn." She came 
 nearer to him. She protested. " All that 
 
 219
 
 220 THE SEA LADY 
 
 I did, Mr. Melville, I did for the best. I 
 saw there was trouble. I could see that I 
 had been deceived, and I stood it as long 
 as I could. I had to speak at last." 
 
 My cousin by leading questions and 
 interrogative silences developed her story 
 a little. 
 
 "And everyone," she said, "blames me. 
 Everyone." 
 
 " Everybody blames everybody who does 
 anything, in affairs of this sort," said 
 Melville. "You mustn't mind thaty 
 
 "I'll try not to," she said bravely. " You 
 know, Mr. Melville—" 
 
 He laid his hand on her shoulder for a 
 moment. " Yes^' he said very impressively, 
 and I think Mrs. Bunting felt better. 
 
 " We all look to you," she said. " I 
 don't know what I could do without 
 you." 
 
 "That's it," said Melville. "How do 
 things stand ? What am I to do ? "
 
 THE CRISIS 221 
 
 "Go to him," said Mrs. Bunting, "and 
 put it all right." 
 
 " But suppose — " began Melville doubt- 
 fully. 
 
 " Go to her. Make her see what it would 
 mean for him and all of us." 
 
 He tried to get more definite instructions. 
 
 " Don't make difficulties," implored Mrs. 
 Bunting. "Think of that poor girl upstairs. 
 Think of us all." 
 
 " Exactly," said Melville, thinking of 
 Chatteris and staring despondently out of 
 the window. 
 
 " Bunting, I gather — " 
 
 " It is you or no one," said Mrs. Bunting, 
 sailing over his unspoken words. " Fred is 
 too young, and Randolph — ! He's not diplo- 
 matic. He — he hectors." 
 
 " Does he .-* " exclaimed Melville. 
 
 " You should see him abroad. Often — 
 many times I have had to interfere. . . . No, 
 it is you. You know Harry so well. He
 
 222 THE SEA LADY 
 
 trusts you. You can say things to him — no 
 one else could say." 
 
 " That reminds me. Does he know — ? " 
 
 "We don't know. How can we know? 
 We know he is infatuated, that is all. He 
 is up there in Folkestone, and she is in Folke- 
 stone, and they may be meeting — " 
 
 My cousin sought counsel with himself. 
 
 " Say you will go ? " said Mrs. Bunting, 
 with a hand upon his arm. 
 
 "I'll gor said Melville, "but I don't see 
 what I can do ! " 
 
 And Mrs. Bunting clasped his hand in 
 both of her own plump shapely hands and 
 said she knew all along that he would, 
 and that for coming down so promptly to 
 her telegram she would be grateful to him 
 so long as she had a breath to draw, 
 and then she added, as though it were part 
 of the same remark, that he must want his 
 lunch. 
 
 He accepted the lunch proposition in an
 
 THE CRISIS 223 
 
 incidental manner and reverted to the ques- 
 tion in hand. 
 
 " Do you know what his attitude — " 
 
 " He has only written to Addy." 
 
 " It isn't as though he had brought about 
 this Crisis ? " 
 
 " It was Addy. He went away, and some- 
 thing in his manner made her write and ask 
 him why ? So soon as she had his letter to 
 say he wanted to rest from politics for a little, 
 that somehow he didn't seem to find the 
 interest in that life that he thought it de- 
 served, she divined everything — " 
 
 " Everything ? Yes, but just what is 
 everything ? " 
 
 " That she had led him on." 
 
 " Miss Waters ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 My cousin reflected. So that was what 
 they considered to be everything! "I wish 
 I knew just where he stood," he said at last, 
 and followed Mrs. Bunting lunchward. In
 
 224 THE SEA LADY 
 
 the course of that meal, which was tete-a-tete, 
 it became almost unsatisfactorily evident what 
 a great relief Melville's consent to interview 
 Chatteris was to Mrs. Bunting. Indeed she 
 seemed to consider herself relieved from the 
 greater portion of her responsibility in the 
 matter, since Melville was bearing her 
 burthen. She sketched out her defence 
 against the accusations that had no doubt 
 been levelled at her, explicitly and implicitly. 
 
 " How was / to know ? " she asked, and 
 she told over again the story of that memor- 
 able landing, but with new, extenuating 
 details. It was Adeline herself who had 
 cried first, " She must be saved 1 " Mrs. 
 Bunting made a special point of that, " And 
 what else was there for me to do .-* " she 
 asked. 
 
 And as she talked, the problem before my 
 cousin assumed graver and yet graver pro- 
 portions. He perceived more and more 
 clearly the complexity of the situation with
 
 THE CRISIS 225 
 
 which he was intrusted. In the first place it 
 
 was not at all clear that Miss Glendower was 
 
 willing to receive back her lover except upon 
 
 terms, and the Sea Lady, he was quite sure, 
 
 did not mean to release him from any grip 
 
 she had upon him. They were preparing to 
 
 treat an elemental struggle as though it were 
 
 an individual case. It grew more and more 
 
 evident to him how entirely Mrs. Bunting 
 
 overlooked the essential nature of the Sea 
 
 Lady, how absolutely she regarded the 
 
 business as a mere everyday vacillation, a 
 
 commonplace outbreak of that jilting spirit 
 
 which dwells, covered deep perhaps, but 
 
 never entirely eradicated, in the heart of man, 
 
 and how confidently she expected him, with 
 
 a little tactful remonstrance and pressure, 
 
 to restore things to their ancient harmony 
 
 again. 
 
 As for Chatteris ! — Melville shook his head 
 
 at the cheese, and answered Mrs. Bunting 
 
 abstractedly. 
 IS
 
 Ill 
 
 "She wants to speak to you," said Mrs. 
 Bunting, and Melville with a certain tre- 
 pidation went upstairs. He went up to the 
 big landing with the seats, to save Adeline 
 the trouble of coming down. She appeared 
 dressed in a black and violet tea gown with 
 much lace, and her dark hair was done with 
 a simple carefulness that suited it. She 
 was pale, and her eyes showed traces of 
 tears, but she had a certain dignity that 
 differed from her usual bearing in being 
 quite unconscious. 
 
 She gave him a limp hand and spoke in 
 an exhausted voice. 
 
 " You know — all ? " she asked. 
 
 "All the outline, anyhow." 
 
 226
 
 THE CRISIS 227 
 
 "Why has he done this to me ? " 
 
 Melville looked profoundly sympathetic 
 through a pause. 
 
 " I feel," she said, " that it isn't coarse- 
 ness." 
 
 " Certainly not," said Melville. 
 
 " It is some mystery of the imagination 
 that I cannot understand. I should have 
 thought — his Career at any rate — would 
 have appealed ..." She shook her head 
 and regarded a pot of ferns fixedly for a 
 space. 
 
 " He has written to you ? " asked Mel- 
 ville. 
 
 " Three times," she said, looking up. 
 
 Melville hesitated to ask the extent of 
 that correspondence, but she left no need 
 for that. 
 
 " I had to ask him," she said. " He kept 
 it all from me, and I had to force it from 
 him before he would tell." 
 
 "Tell!" said Melville, "what?"
 
 228 THE SEA LADY 
 
 " What he felt for her and what he felt 
 for me." 
 
 "Butdidhe— ?" 
 
 "He has made it clearer. But still, even 
 now. No, I don't understand." 
 
 She turned slowly and watched Melville's 
 face as she spoke. "You know, Mr. Melville, 
 that has been an enormous shock to me. I 
 suppose I never really knew him. I suppose 
 I— idealised him. I thought he cared for 
 — our work at any rate. ... He did care 
 for our work. He believed in it. Surely 
 he believed in it." 
 
 " He does," said Melville. 
 
 " And then — . But how can he ? " 
 
 ** He is — he is a man with rather a strong 
 
 imagmation 
 
 £5 
 
 " Or a weak will ? " 
 
 *' Relatively — yes." 
 
 " It is so strange," she sighed. " It is so 
 inconsistent. It is like a child catching at 
 a new toy. Do you know, Mr. Melville," —
 
 THE CRISIS 229 
 
 she hesitated, — "all this has made me feel 
 old. I feel very much older, very much 
 wiser, than he is. I cannot help it. I am 
 afraid it is for all women ... to feel that 
 sometimes." 
 
 She reflected profoundly. " For all 
 women — . . . The Child Man ! I see now 
 just what Sarah Grand meant by that." 
 
 She smiled a wan smile. " I feel just as 
 though he had been a naughty child. 
 
 •' And I— I worshipped him, Mr. Melville," 
 she said, and her voice quivered. 
 
 My cousin coughed, and turned about to 
 stare hard out of the window. He was, 
 he perceived, much more shockingly in- 
 adequate even than he had expected to be. 
 
 "If I thought she could make him 
 happy — " she said presently, leaving a hiatus 
 of generous self-sacrifice. 
 
 "The case is — complicated^' said Melville. 
 
 Her voice went on, clear and a little high, 
 resigned, impenetrably assured.
 
 230 THE SEA LADY 
 
 " But she would not. All his better side, 
 all his serious side — . She would miss it 
 and ruin it all." 
 
 " Does he — " began Melville, and repented 
 of the temerity of his question. 
 
 "Yes?" she said. 
 
 " Does he — ask to be released ? " 
 
 " No. . . . He wants to come back to 
 me. 
 
 "And you?" 
 
 " He doesn't come." 
 
 " But do you — do you want him back ? " 
 
 " How can I say, Mr. Melville? He does 
 not say certainly even that he wants to come 
 back." 
 
 My cousin Melville looked perplexed. He 
 lived on the superficies of emotion, and these 
 complexities in matters he had always 
 assumed were simple put him out. 
 
 "There are times," she said, "when it 
 seems to me that my love for him is alto- 
 gether dead. . . . Think of the disillusion-
 
 THE CRISIS 231 
 
 ment — the shock — the discovery of such 
 weakness." 
 
 My cousin Hfted his eyebrows and shook 
 his head in agreement. 
 
 "His feet — to find his feet were of 
 Clay ! " 
 
 There came a pause. 
 
 "It seems I have never loved him. And 
 then — And then I think of all the thingrs 
 he still might be." 
 
 Her voice made him look up, and he saw 
 that her mouth was set hard and tears were 
 running down her cheeks. 
 
 It occurred to my cousin, he says, that he 
 would touch her hand in a sympathetic 
 manner, and then it occurred to him that he 
 wouldn't. Her words rang in his thoughts 
 for a space, and then he said belatedly, " He 
 may still be all those things." 
 
 " I suppose he may," she said slowly and 
 without colour. The weeping moment had 
 passed.
 
 232 THE SEA LADY 
 
 "What is she?" She changed abruptly. 
 "What is this Being who has come between 
 him and all the realities of life ? What is 
 there about her — ? . . . And why should 
 I have to compete with her, because 
 he — because he doesn't know his own 
 mind ? " 
 
 "For a man," said Melville, "to know 
 his own mind, is — to have exhausted one 
 of the chief interests in life. After that — ! 
 A cultivated extinct volcano. (If ever it 
 was a volcano)." 
 
 He reflected egotistically for a space. 
 Then with a secret start he came back to 
 consider her. 
 
 " What is there," she said, with that 
 deliberate attempt at clearness which was 
 one of her antipathetic qualities for Melville, 
 — "what is there that she has, that she offers, 
 that /— ?" 
 
 Melville winced at this deliberate pro- 
 posal of appalling comparisons. All the
 
 THE CRISIS 233 
 
 catlike quality in his soul came to his aid. 
 He began to edge away and go obliquely 
 and generally shirk the issue. " My dear 
 Miss Glendower ! " he said, and tried to 
 make that seem an adequate reply. 
 
 "What is the difference?" she insisted. 
 
 "There are impalpable things," waived 
 Melville. " They are above reason and 
 beyond describing." 
 
 "But you," she urged, "you take an 
 attitude, you must have an impression. 
 Why don't you — Don't you see, Mr. 
 Melville, this is very " — her voice caught 
 for a moment — "very vital for me. It 
 isn't kind of you, if you have impres- 
 sions — . I'm sorry, Mr. Melville, if I seem 
 to be trying to get too much from you. 
 I — I want to know." 
 
 It came into Melville's head for a moment 
 perhaps that this girl had something in her 
 that was just a little beyond his former 
 judgments.
 
 234 THE SEA LADY 
 
 " I must admit, I have a sort of impres- 
 sion," he said. 
 
 "You are a man, you know him, you 
 know all sorts of things, all sorts of ways 
 of looking at things, I don't know. If 
 you could go so far — as to be frank." 
 
 "Well," said Melville, and stopped. 
 
 She hung over him, as it were, as a 
 tense silence. 
 
 " There is a difference," he admitted, and 
 still went unhelped. 
 
 "How can I put it? I think in certain 
 ways you contrast with her in a way that 
 makes things easier for her. 
 
 "He has — I know the thing is made 
 into a cant, only, you know, he doesn't 
 plead it in defence — he has a temperament, 
 to which she sometimes appeals more than 
 you do." 
 
 "Yes, I know; but How?" 
 
 "Well—" 
 
 "Tell me."
 
 THE CRISIS 235 
 
 " You are austere. You are restrained. 
 Life — for a man like Chatteris — is school- 
 ing. He has something — something 
 perhaps more worth having than most of 
 us have — but I think at times — it makes 
 life harder for him than it is for a lot of 
 us. Life comes at him, with limitations 
 and regulations. He knows his duty well 
 enough. And you — . You mustn't mind 
 what I say too much, Miss Glendower — I 
 may be wrong." 
 
 "Go on," she said, "go on." 
 
 "You are too much — the agent-general 
 of his duty." 
 
 " But surely ! — what else — ? " 
 
 " I talked to him in London, and then I 
 thought he was quite in the wrong. Since 
 that I've thought all sorts of things — even 
 that you might be in the wrong. In certain 
 minor things." 
 
 " Don't mind my vanity now,'' she cried. 
 "Tell me."
 
 236 THE SEA LADY 
 
 "You see you have defined things — very 
 clearly. You have made it clear to him 
 what you expect him to be, and what you 
 expect him to do. It is like having built 
 a house in which he is to live. For him 
 to go to her is like going out of a house, 
 a very fine and dignified house, I admit, 
 into something larger, something adven- 
 turous and incalculable. She is — she has 
 an air of being — natural. She is as lax 
 and lawless as the sunset, she is as free 
 and familiar as the wind. She doesn't, if 
 I may put it in this way, she doesn't love 
 and respect him when he is this and dis- 
 approve of him highly when he is that — 
 she takes him altogether. She has the 
 quality of the open sky, of deep tangled 
 places, of the flight of birds, she has the 
 quality of the high sea. That I think is 
 what she is for him ; — she is the Great 
 Outside. You — you have the quality — " 
 
 He hesitated.
 
 THE CRISIS 237 
 
 "Goon," she insisted. "Let us get the 
 meaning." 
 
 "Of an edifice. ... I don't sympathise 
 with him," said Melville ; " I am a tame cat, 
 and I should scratch and mew at the door 
 directly I got outside of things. I don't 
 want to go out. The thought scares me. 
 But he is different." 
 
 "Yes," she said, "he is different." 
 
 For a time it seemed that Melville's 
 interpretation had hold of her. She stood 
 thoughtful. Slowly other aspects of the 
 thing came into his mind. 
 
 "Of course," she said, thinking as she 
 looked at him. " Yes. Yes. That is 
 the impression. That is the quality. But 
 in reality — . There are other things in 
 the world beside effects and impressions. 
 After all, that is — an analogy. It is 
 pleasant to go out of houses and dwellings 
 into the open air, but most of us, nearly 
 all of us, must live in houses."
 
 238 THE SEA LADY 
 
 "Decidedly," said Melville. 
 
 *• He cannot — . What can he do with 
 her? How can he live with her? What 
 life could they have in common ? " 
 
 " It's a case of attraction," said Melville, 
 "and not of plans," 
 
 "After all," she said, "he must come 
 back — if I let him come back. He may 
 spoil everything now, he may lose his 
 election and be forced to start again, lower 
 and less hopefully, he may tear his heart to 
 pieces — " 
 
 She stopped at a sob. 
 
 " Miss Glendower," said Melville abruptly, 
 " I don't think you quite understand." 
 
 "Understand what?" 
 
 " You think he cannot marry this — this 
 being who has come among us ? " 
 
 "How could he?" 
 
 " No — he couldn't. You think his 
 imagination has wandered away from you 
 — to something impossible. That generally,
 
 THE CRISIS 239 
 
 in an aimless way, he has cut himself up 
 for nothing, and made an inordinate fool 
 of himself, and that it's simply a business 
 of putting everything back into place 
 again." 
 
 He paused, and she said nothing ; but 
 her face was attentive. " What you do 
 not understand," he went on, "what no 
 one seems to understand, is that she 
 comes — " 
 
 " Out of the sea." 
 
 " Out of some other world. She comes, 
 whispering that this life is a phantom life, 
 unreal, flimsy, limited, casting upon every- 
 thing a spell of disillusionment — " 
 
 "So that he — " 
 
 " Yes, and then she whispers. There are 
 better dreams ! " 
 
 The girl regarded him in frank per- 
 plexity. 
 
 "She hints of these vague better dreams, 
 she whispers of a way. ..."
 
 240 THE SEA LADY 
 
 "I do not know what way. But it is 
 something — something that tears at the 
 very fabric of this daily Hfe." 
 
 " You mean— ?" 
 
 " She is a mermaid, she is a thinor of 
 dreams and desires, a siren, a whisper, and 
 a seduction. She will lure him with 
 her—" 
 
 He stopped. 
 
 " Where f " she whispered. 
 
 " Into the deeps." 
 
 " The deeps ? " 
 
 They hung upon a long pause. Melville 
 sought vagueness with infinite solicitude, 
 and could not find it. He blurted out at 
 last, "There can be but one way out of 
 this dream we are all dreaming, you 
 know." 
 
 "And that way?" 
 
 " That way — " began Melville and dared 
 not say it.
 
 THE CRISIS 241 
 
 ''You mean," she said, with a pale face, 
 half awakened to a new thought, " the way 
 is . . . ?" 
 
 Melville shirked the word. He met her 
 eyes and nodded weakly. 
 
 " But how — ? " she asked. 
 
 "At any rate — " he said hastily, seek- 
 ing some palliative phrase. "At any rate, 
 if she gets him, this little world of yours — 
 There will be no coming back for him, you 
 know." 
 
 "No coming back," she said. 
 
 " No coming back," said Melville. 
 
 "But are you sure.-*" she doubted. 
 
 "Sure?" 
 
 " That it is so ? " 
 
 " That desire is desire, and the deep the 
 deep — yes." 
 
 " I never thought — " she began, and 
 stopped. 
 
 "Mr. Melville," she said, "you know I 
 
 don't understand. I thought — I scarcely 
 i6
 
 242 THE SEA LADY 
 
 know what I thought. I thought he 
 was trivial and fooHsh to let his 
 thoughts go wandering. I agree — I 
 see your point — as to the difference 
 in our effect upon him. But this — this 
 suggestion that for him she may be 
 something determining and final — . After 
 all, she — " 
 
 " She is nothing," he said. " She is the 
 hand that takes hold of him, something that 
 stands for things unseen." 
 
 " What things unseen ? " 
 
 My cousin shrugged his shoulders. 
 " Something we never find in life," he said. 
 " Something we are always seeking." 
 
 *' But what ? " she asked. 
 
 Melville made no reply. She scrutinised 
 his face for a time, and then looked out at 
 the sunlight again. 
 
 " Do you want him back } " he said. 
 
 " I don't know." 
 
 " Do you want him back ? "
 
 THE CRISIS 243 
 
 " I feel as though I had never wanted him 
 before." 
 
 " And now ? " 
 
 " Yes. . . . But — if he will not come 
 back ? " 
 
 " He will not come back," said Melville, 
 " for the work." 
 
 " I know." 
 
 " He will not come back for his self- 
 respect — or any of those things." 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Those things, you know, are only fainter 
 dreams. All the palace you have made for 
 him is a dream. But — " 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 " He might come back — " he said, and 
 looked at her and stopped. He tells me he 
 had some vague intention of startling her, 
 rousing her, wounding her to some display 
 of romantic force, some insurgence of passion, 
 that might yet win Chatteris back, and then 
 in that moment, and like a blow, it came to
 
 244 THE SEA LADY 
 
 him how foolish such a fancy had been. 
 There she stood, impenetrably herself, limited, 
 intelligent, well - meaning, imitative, and 
 powerless. Her pose, her face, suggested 
 nothing but a clear and reasonable objection 
 to all that had come to her, a critical 
 antagonism, a steady opposition. And then, 
 amazingly, she changed. She looked up, 
 and suddenly held out both her hands, and 
 there was something in her eyes that he had 
 never seen before. 
 
 Melville took her two hands mechanically, 
 and for a second or so they stood looking 
 with a sort of discovery into each other's 
 eyes. 
 
 " Tell him," she said, with an astounding 
 perfection of simplicity, " to come back to 
 me. There can be no other thing than 
 what I am. Tell him to come back 
 to me ! " 
 
 "And—?" 
 
 "Tell him thaC
 
 THE CRISIS 245 
 
 " Forgiveness ?" 
 
 "No! Tell him I want him. If he will 
 not come for that he will not come at all. If 
 he will not come back for that " — she halted 
 for a moment — " I do not want him. No ! 
 I do not want him. He is not mine, and he 
 may go." 
 
 His passive hold of her hands became 
 a pressure. Then they dropped apart 
 again. 
 
 " You are very good to help us," she said 
 as he turned to go. 
 
 He looked at her. " You are very good 
 to help me," she said ; and then : " Tell him 
 whatever you like, if only he will come back 
 to me ! . . . No ! Tell him what I have 
 said." He saw she had something more to 
 say, and stopped. " You know, Mr. Melville, 
 all this is like a book newly opened to me. 
 Are you sure — ? " 
 
 "Sure?" 
 
 " Sure of what you say — sure of what she
 
 246 THE SEA LADY 
 
 is to him — sure that if he goes on he will — " 
 She stopped. 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 "It means — " she said, and stopped 
 again. 
 
 " No adventure, no incident, but a going 
 out from all that this life has to offer." 
 
 " You mean," she insisted, " you mean — ? " 
 
 ''Death,'' said Melville starkly, and for a 
 space both stood without a word. 
 
 She winced, and remained looking into his 
 eyes. Then she spoke again. 
 
 " Mr. Melville, tell him to come back to 
 
 )) 
 
 me. 
 
 "And—?" 
 
 "Tell him to come back to me, or" — 
 a sudden note of passion rang in her voice — 
 "if I have no hold upon him, let him go his 
 way." 
 
 " But—" said Melville. 
 
 " I know," she cried, with her face set, " I 
 know. But if he is mine he will come to
 
 THE CRISIS 247 
 
 me, and if he is not — Let him dream his 
 dream." 
 
 Her clenched hand tightened as she spoke. 
 He saw in her face she would say no more, 
 that she wanted urgently to leave it there. 
 He turned again towards the staircase. He 
 glanced at her and went down. 
 
 As he looked up from the bend of the 
 stairs she was still standing in the light. 
 
 He was moved to proclaim himself in 
 some manner her adherent, but he could 
 think of nothing better than: "Whatever I 
 can do I will." And so, after a curious 
 pause, he departed, rather stumblingly, from 
 her sight.
 
 IV 
 
 After this interview it was right and proper 
 that Melville should have gone at once to 
 Chatteris, but the course of events in this 
 world does occasionally display a lamentable 
 disregard for what is right and proper. 
 Points of view were destined to crowd upon 
 him that day — for the most part entirely un- 
 sympathetic points of view. He found Mrs. 
 Bunting in the company of a boldly trimmed 
 bonnet in the hall, waiting, it became clear, 
 to intercept him. 
 
 As he descended, in a state of extreme 
 preoccupation, the boldly trimmed bonnet 
 revealed beneath it a white-faced, resolute 
 person in a duster and sensible boots. This 
 stranger, Mrs. Bunting made apparent, was
 
 THE CRISIS 249 
 
 Lady Poynting Mallow, one of the more 
 representative of the Chatteris aunts. Her 
 ladyship made a few enquiries about Adeline 
 with an eye that took Melville's measure, 
 and then, after agreeing to a number of the 
 things Mrs. Bunting had to advance, sug- 
 gested that he should escort her back to her 
 hotel. He was much too exercised with 
 Adeline to discuss the proposal. " I walk," 
 she said. "And we go along the lower 
 road." 
 
 He found himself walking. 
 
 She remarked, as the Bunting door closed 
 behind them, that it was always a comfort to 
 have to do with a man ; and there was a 
 silence for a space. 
 
 I don't think at that time Melville com- 
 pletely grasped the fact that he had a 
 companion. But presently his medita- 
 tions were disturbed by her voice. He 
 started. 
 
 " I beg your pardon," he said.
 
 250 THE SEA LADY 
 
 "That Bunting woman is a Fool," re- 
 peated Lady Poynting Mallow. 
 
 There was a slight interval for considera- 
 tion. 
 
 " She's an old friend of mine," said 
 Melville. 
 
 " Quite possibly," said Lady Poynting 
 Mallow. 
 
 The position seemed a litde awkward to 
 Melville for a moment. He flicked a frag- 
 ment of orange peel into the road. " I want 
 to get to the bottom of all this," said Lady 
 Poynting Mallow. "Who is this other 
 woman ? " 
 
 " What other woman ? " 
 
 " Tertium quid,'' said Lady Poynting 
 Mallow, with a luminous incorrectness. 
 
 "Mermaid, I gather," said Melville. 
 
 "What's the objection to her?" 
 
 "Tail." 
 
 " Fin and all .? " 
 
 " Complete."
 
 THE CRISIS 251 
 
 " You're sure of it ? " 
 
 "Certain." 
 
 " How do you know ? " 
 
 "I'm certain," repeated Melville with a 
 quite unusual testiness. 
 
 The lady reflected. 
 
 " Well, there's worse things in the world 
 than a fishy tail," she said at last. 
 
 Melville saw no necessity for a reply. 
 " H'm," said Lady Poynting Mallow, appar- 
 ently by way of comment on his silence, 
 and for a space they went on. 
 
 "That Glendower girl is a Fool too," she 
 added after a pause. 
 
 My cousin opened his mouth and shut it 
 again. How can one answer when ladies 
 talk in this way ? But if he did not answer, 
 at any rate his preoccupation was gone. 
 He was now acutely aware of the determined 
 person at his side. 
 
 " She has means ? " she asked abruptly. 
 
 " Miss Glendower ? "
 
 252 THE SEA LADY 
 
 " No. I know all about her. The 
 other." 
 
 " The Mermaid ? " 
 
 "Yes, the Mermaid. Why not?" 
 
 "Oh, she — . Very considerable means. 
 Galleons, Phoenician treasure ships, wrecked 
 frigates, submarine reefs — " 
 
 "Well, that's all right. And now will you 
 tell me, Mr. Melville, why shouldn't Harry 
 have her? What if she is a Mermaid ! It's 
 no worse than an American silver mine, and 
 not nearly so raw and ill-bred." 
 
 " In the first place there's his engage- 
 ment — " 
 
 "Oh, that!'' 
 
 "And in the next there's the Sea Lady." 
 
 " But I thought she — " 
 
 " She's a mermaid." 
 
 "It's no objection. So far as I can see, 
 she'd make an excellent wife for him. And, 
 as a matter of fact, down here she'd be able 
 to help him in just the right way. The
 
 THE CRISIS 253 
 
 member here — he'll be fighting — this Sassoon 
 man — makes a lot of capital out of Deep Sea 
 Cables. Couldn't be better. Harry could 
 dish him easily. That's all right. . . . Why 
 shouldnt he have her ? " 
 
 She stuck her hands deeply into the 
 pockets of her dust-coat, and a china-blue 
 eye regarded Melville from under the brim 
 of the boldly trimmed bonnet. 
 
 " You understand clearly she is a properly 
 constituted Mermaid with a real physical 
 tail ? " 
 
 " Well ? " said Lady Poynting Mallow. 
 
 " Apart from any question of Miss 
 Glendower — " 
 
 "That's understood." 
 
 " I think that such a marriage would be 
 impossible." 
 
 "Why.?" 
 
 My cousin played round the question. 
 " She's an immortal, for example, with a 
 Past."
 
 254 THE SEA LADY 
 
 "Simply makes her more interesting." 
 
 Melville tried to enter into her point of 
 view. "You think," he said, "she would 
 go to London for him, and marry at St. 
 George's, Hanover Square, and pay for a 
 mansion in Park Lane, and visit just any- 
 where he liked." 
 
 " That's precisely what she would do. 
 Just now, with a Court that is waking 
 up— 
 
 " It's precisely what she won't do," said 
 Melville. 
 
 " But any woman would do it who had 
 the chance." 
 
 " She's a mermaid." 
 
 " She's a Fool," said Lady Poynting 
 Mallow. 
 
 " She doesn't even mean to marry him ; 
 it doesn't enter into her code." 
 
 " The Hussy ! What does she mean ? " 
 
 My cousin made a gesture seaward. 
 "That!" he said. "She's a mermaid."
 
 THE CRISIS 255 
 
 "What?" 
 
 " Out there." 
 
 "Where?" 
 
 "There!" 
 
 Lady Poynting Mallow scanned the sea 
 as though it were some curious new object. 
 " It's an amphibious outlook for the family," 
 she said after reflection. " But even then — 
 if she doesn't care for society and it makes 
 Harry happy — and perhaps after they are 
 tired of — rusticating — " 
 
 " I don't think you fully realise she is a 
 mermaid," said Melville; "and Chatteris, 
 you know, breathes air." 
 
 "That is a difficulty," admitted Lady 
 Poynting Mallow, and studied the sunlit 
 offing for a space. 
 
 " I don't see why it shouldn't be 
 managed, for all that," she considered after 
 a pause. 
 
 " It can't be," said Melville with arid 
 emphasis.
 
 256 THE SEA LADY 
 
 "She cares for him?" 
 
 " She's come to fetch him." 
 
 " If she wants him badly he might make 
 terms. In these affairs it's always one or 
 other has to do the buying. She'd have to 
 marry — anyhow. " 
 
 My cousin regarded her impenetrably 
 satisfied face. 
 
 " He could have a yacht and a diving bell," 
 she suggested, " if she wanted him to visit 
 her people." 
 
 " They are Pagan demigods, I believe, 
 and live In some mythological way in the 
 Mediterranean." 
 
 " Dear Harry's a Pagan himself — so that 
 doesn't matter ; and as for being mythological 
 — all good families are. He could even wear 
 a diving dress if one could be found to suit 
 him." 
 
 " I don't think that anything of the sort is 
 possible for a moment." 
 
 " Simply because you've never been a
 
 THE CRISIS 257 
 
 woman in love," said Lady Poynting Mallow 
 with an air of vast experience. 
 
 She continued the conversation. " If it's 
 sea - water she wants it would be quite 
 easy to fit up a tank wherever they lived, 
 and she could easily have a bath - chair 
 like a sitz - bath on wheels. . . . Really, 
 Mr. Milvain— " 
 
 "Melville." 
 
 " Mr. Melville, I don't see where your 
 impossible comes in." 
 
 " Have you seen the lady.-* " 
 
 " Do you think I've been in Folkestone 
 two days doing nothing ? " 
 
 " You don't mean you've called on 
 her." 
 
 "Dear no! It's Harry's place to settle 
 
 that. But I've seen her in her bath-chair on 
 
 the Leas, and I'm certain I've never seen 
 
 anyone who looked so worthy of dear Harry. 
 
 Never ! " 
 
 " Well, well," said Melville. " Apart from 
 17
 
 258 THE SEA LADY 
 
 any other considerations, you know, there's 
 Miss Glendower." 
 
 " I've never regarded her as a suitable 
 wife for Harry." 
 
 " Possibly not. Still — she exists." 
 
 " So many people do," said Lady Poynting 
 Mallow. 
 
 She evidently regarded that branch of the 
 subject as dismissed. 
 
 They pursued their way in silence. 
 
 " What I wanted to ask you, Mr. Milvain — " 
 
 "Melville." 
 
 "Mr. Melville, is just precisely where you 
 come into this business ? " 
 
 " I'm a friend of Miss Glendower." 
 
 " Who wants him back." 
 
 " Frankly — yes." 
 
 " Isn't she devoted to him ? " 
 
 " I presume, as she's engaged — " 
 
 "She ought to be devoted to him — yes. 
 Well, why can't she see that she ought to 
 release him for his own good ? "
 
 THE CRISIS 259 
 
 "She doesn't see it's for his good. Nor 
 do I." 
 
 " Simply an old-fashioned prejudice be- 
 cause the woman's got a tail. Those old 
 frumps at Wampach's are quite of your 
 opinion." 
 
 Melville shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " And so I suppose you're going to bully 
 and threaten on account of Miss Glendower. 
 . . . You'll do no good." 
 
 " May I ask what you are going to do ? " 
 
 "What a good aunt always does." 
 
 "And that?" 
 
 " Let him do what he likes." 
 
 "Suppose he wants to drown himself?" 
 
 " My dear Mr. Milvain, Harry isn't a 
 Fool." 
 
 " I've told you she's a mermaid." 
 
 "Ten times." 
 
 A constrained silence fell between them. 
 
 It became apparent they were near the 
 Folkestone lift.
 
 260 THE SEA LADY 
 
 "You'll do no good," said Lady Poynting 
 Mallow. 
 
 Melville's escort concluded at the lift 
 station. There the lady turned upon 
 him. 
 
 " I'm greatly obliged to you for coming, 
 Mr. Milvain," she said; "and very glad to 
 hear your views of this matter. It's a peculiar 
 business, but I hope we're sensible people. 
 You think over what I have said. As a 
 friend of Harry's. You are a friend of 
 Harry's } " 
 
 " We've known each other some years." 
 
 " I feel sure you will come round to my 
 point of view, sooner or later. It is so 
 obviously the best thing for him." 
 
 "There's Miss Glendower." 
 
 " If Miss Glendower is a womanly woman, 
 she will be ready to make any sacrifice for 
 his good." 
 
 And with that they parted. 
 
 In the course of another minute Melville
 
 THE CRISIS 261 
 
 found himself on the side of the road opposite 
 the lift station, regarding the ascending car. 
 The boldly trimmed bonnet, vivid, erect, 
 assertive, went gliding upward, a perfect 
 embodiment of sound common-sense. His 
 mind was lapsing once again into disorder ; 
 he was stunned, as it were, by the vigour of 
 her ladyship's view. Could anyone not ab- 
 solutely right be quite so clear and emphatic ? 
 And if so, what became of all that oppression 
 of foreboding, that sinister promise of an 
 escape, that whisper of " other dreams," 
 that had dominated his mind only a short 
 half-hour before ? 
 
 He turned his face back to Sandgate, a 
 theatre of warring doubts. Quite vividly he 
 could see the Sea Lady as Lady Poynting 
 Mallow saw her, as something pink and solid 
 and smart and wealthy, and indeed quite 
 abominably vulgar, and yet quite as vividly 
 he recalled her as she had talked to him 
 in the garden, her face of shadows, her
 
 262 THE SEA LADY 
 
 eyes of deep mystery, and the whisper 
 that made all the world about him no 
 more than a flimsy thin curtain before 
 vague and wonderful and hitherto quite 
 unsuspected things.
 
 V 
 
 Chatteris was leaning against the railings. 
 He started violently at Melville's hand upon 
 his shoulder. They made awkward greet- 
 ings. 
 
 "The fact is," said Melville, " I— I have 
 been asked to talk to you." 
 
 " Don't apologise," said Chatteris. " I'm 
 glad to have it out with someone." 
 
 There was a brief silence. 
 
 They stood side by side — looking down 
 upon the Harbour. Behind them the evening 
 band played remotely, and the black little 
 promenaders went to and fro under the tall 
 electric lights. I think Chatteris decided to 
 be very self-possessed at first, — a man of 
 the world.
 
 264 THE SEA LADY 
 
 "It's a gorgeous night," he said. 
 
 "Glorious," said Melville, playing in the 
 key set. 
 
 He clicked his cutter on a cigar. " There 
 was something you wanted me to tell 
 you — " 
 
 " I know all that," said Chatteris, with 
 the shoulder towards Melville becoming 
 obtrusive. ** I know everything." 
 
 " You have seen and talked to her ? " 
 
 " Several times." 
 
 There was perhaps a minute's pause. 
 
 " What are you going to do ? " asked 
 Melville. 
 
 Chatteris made no answer, and Melville 
 did not repeat his question. 
 
 Presently Chatteris turned about. " Let's 
 walk," he said, and they paced westward, 
 side by side. 
 
 He made a little speech. " I'm sorry to 
 give everybody all this trouble," he said with 
 an air of having prepared his sentences ; " I
 
 THE CRISIS 265 
 
 suppose there is no question that I have 
 behaved Hke an ass. I am profoundly sorry. 
 Largely it is my own fault. But you know 
 — so far as the overt kick-up goes — there is 
 a certain amount of blame attaches to our 
 outspoken friend Mrs. Bunting." 
 
 " I'm afraid there is," Melville admitted. 
 
 "You know there are times when one is 
 under the necessity of having moods. It 
 doesn't help them to drag them into general 
 discussion." 
 
 " The mischiefs done." 
 
 "You know Adeline seems to have ob- 
 jected to the presence of — this Sea Lady, at 
 a very early stage. Mrs. Bunting overruled 
 her. Afterwards when there was trouble 
 she seems to have tried to make up for 
 It. 
 
 " I didn't know Miss Glendower had 
 objected." 
 
 *' She did. She seems to have seen — 
 ahead."
 
 266 THE SEA LADY 
 
 Chatteris reflected. " Of course all that 
 doesn't excuse me in the least. But it's a 
 sort of excuse for your being dragged into 
 this bother." 
 
 He said something less distinctly about a 
 "stupid bother" and " private affairs." 
 
 They found themselves drawing near the 
 band and already on the outskirts of its terri- 
 tory of votaries. Its cheerful rhythms became 
 insistent. The canopy of the stand was a 
 focus of bright light, music - stands and 
 instruments sent out beams of reflected 
 brilliance, and a luminous red conductor in 
 the midst of the lantern guided the ratatoo- 
 tat, ratatoo-tat of a popular air. Voices, 
 detached fragments of conversation, came to 
 our talkers and mingled impertinently with 
 their thoughts. 
 
 " I wouldn't 'ave no truck wiv 'im, not 
 after thet," said a young person to her friend. 
 
 " Let's get out of this," said Chatteris 
 abruptly.
 
 THE CRISIS 267 
 
 They turned aside from the high path of 
 the Leas to the head of some steps that led 
 down the declivity. In a few moments it 
 was as if those imposing fronts of stucco, 
 those many - windowed hotels, the electric 
 lights on the tall masts, the band-stand and 
 miscellaneous holiday British Public, had 
 never existed. It is one of Folkestone's best 
 effects, that black quietness under the very 
 feet of a crowd. They no longer heard the 
 band even, only a remote suggestion of music 
 filtered to them over the brow. The black- 
 treed slopes fell from them to the surf below, 
 and out at sea were the lights of many ships. 
 Away to the westward like a swarm of fire- 
 flies hung the lights of Hythe. The two 
 men sat down on a vacant seat in the dim- 
 ness. For a time neither spoke. Chatteris 
 impressed Melville with an air of being on 
 the defensive. He murmured in a medi- 
 tative undertone, " I wouldn't 'ave no truck 
 wiv 'im, not after thet."
 
 268 THE SEA LADY 
 
 " I will admit by every standard," he 
 said aloud, "that I have been flappy 
 and feeble and vi^rong. Very. In these 
 things there is a prescribed and definite 
 course. To hesitate, to have two points 
 of view, is condemned by all right-think- 
 ing people. . . . Still — one has the two 
 points of view. . . . You have come up from 
 Sandgate ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Did you see Miss Glendower ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Talked to her ? . . . I suppose — . What 
 do you think of her ? " 
 
 His cigar glowed into an expectant bright- 
 ness while Melville hesitated at his answer, 
 and showed his eyes thoughtful upon Mel- 
 ville's face. 
 
 "I've never thought her — " Melville 
 sought more diplomatic phrasing. " I've 
 never found her exceptionally attractive 
 before. Handsome, you know, but not —
 
 THE CRISIS 269 
 
 winning. But this time, she seemed . . . 
 rather splendid." 
 
 " She is," said Chatteris, " she is." 
 
 He sat forward and began flicking 
 imaginary ash from the end of his cigar. 
 
 " She w splendid," he admitted. ''You — 
 only begin to imagine. You don't, my dear 
 man, know that girl. She is not — quite — in 
 your line. She is, I assure you, the 
 straiofhtest and cleanest and clearest human 
 being I have ever met. She believes so 
 firmly, she does right so simply, there is a 
 sort of queenly benevolence, a sort of in- 
 tegrity of benevolence — " 
 
 He left the sentence unfinished, as though 
 unfinished it completely expressed his thought. 
 
 " She wants you to go back to her," said 
 Melville blundy. 
 
 " I know," said Chatteris, and flicked again 
 at that ghostly ash. " She has written that 
 . . . . That's just where her complete 
 magnificence comes in. She doesn't fence
 
 270 THE SEA LADY 
 
 and fool about, as the she-women do. She 
 doesn't squawk and say you've insulted me 
 and everything's at an end, and she doesn't 
 squawk and say for God's sake come back to 
 me ! She doesn't say she * won't 'ave no truck 
 wiv me, not after this.' She writes — straight. 
 I don't believe, Melville, I half knew her 
 until all this business came up. She comes 
 out. . . . Before that, it was, as you said, 
 and I quite perceive — I perceived all along 
 — a little too — statistical." 
 
 He became meditative, and his cigar 
 glow waned and presently vanished alto- 
 gether. 
 
 '* You are going back ? " 
 
 "By Jove! Yes^ 
 
 Melville stirred slightly, and then they 
 both sat rigidly quiet for a space. Then 
 abruptly Chatteris flung away his extinct 
 cigar. He seemed to fling many other 
 things away with that dim gesture. " Of 
 course," he said, " I shall go back.
 
 THE CRISIS 271 
 
 " It is not my fault," he insisted, "that this 
 trouble, this separation, has ever arisen. I 
 was moody, I was preoccupied I know — 
 things had got into my head. But if I'd 
 been left alone. . . . 
 
 " I have been forced into this position," he 
 summarised. 
 
 "You understand," said Melville, "that — 
 though I think matters are undefined and 
 distressing just now — I don't attach blame — 
 anywhere." 
 
 "You're open-minded," said Chatteris. 
 "That's just your way. And I can imagine 
 how all this upset and discomfort distresses 
 you. You're awfully good to keep so open- 
 minded and not to make me an utter outcast, 
 an ill-reofulated disturber of the order of the 
 world." 
 
 "It's a distressing state of affairs," said 
 Melville. " But perhaps I understand the 
 forces pulling at you — better than you 
 imagine."
 
 272 THE SEA LADY 
 
 " They're very simple, I suppose." 
 
 " Very." 
 
 "And yet—.?" 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 He seemed to hesitate at a dangerous 
 topic. "The other," he said. 
 
 Melville's silence bade him go on. 
 
 He plunged from his prepared attitude. 
 " What is it ? Why should — this being — 
 come into my life, as she has done, if it ts so 
 simple? What is there about her, or me, 
 that has pulled me so astray ? She has, you 
 know. Here we are at sixes and sevens! 
 It's not the situation, it's the mental conflict. 
 Why am I pulled about ? She has got into 
 my imagination. How ? I haven't the 
 remotest idea." 
 
 " She's beautiful," meditated Melville. 
 
 " She's beautiful, certainly. But so is Miss 
 Glendower." 
 
 " She's very beautiful. I'm not blind, 
 Chatteris. She's beautiful in a different way."
 
 THE CRISIS 273 
 
 "Yes, but that's only the name for the 
 effect. Why is she very beautiful ? " 
 
 Melville shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " She's not beautiful to everyone." 
 
 " You mean ?" 
 
 " Bunting keeps calm." 
 
 "Oh— /^^— !" 
 
 " And other people don't seem to see it — 
 as I do." 
 
 " Some people seem to see no beauty at 
 all, as we do. With emotion, that is." 
 
 "Why do w^?" 
 
 " We see — finer." 
 
 ''Do we? Is it finer? Why should it 
 
 be finer to see beauty where it is fatal to 
 
 us to see it? Why? Unless we are to 
 
 believe there is no reason in things, why 
 
 should this — impossibility be beautiful to 
 
 anyone, anyhow? Put it as a matter of 
 
 reason, Melville. Why should her smile be 
 
 so sweet to me, why should her voice move 
 
 me? Why hers and not Adeline's? Adeline 
 i8
 
 274 THE SEA LADY 
 
 has straight eyes and clear eyes and fine 
 eyes, — and all the difference there can be, 
 what is it? An infinitesimal curving of 
 the lid, an infinitesimal difference in the 
 lashes — and it shatters everything — in this 
 way. Who could measure the difference, 
 who could tell the quality that makes me 
 swim in the sound of her voice ? . . . 
 The difference? After all, it's a visible 
 thing, it's a material thing! It's in my 
 eyes. By Jove!" he laughed abruptly. 
 " Imagine old Helmholtz trying to gauge 
 it with a battery of resonators, or Spencer 
 in the light of Evolution and the Environ- 
 ment explaining it away ! " 
 
 "These things are beyond measurement," 
 said Melville. 
 
 " Not if you measure them by their effect," 
 said Chatteris. *' And anyhow, why do they 
 take us ? That is the question I can't get 
 away from just now." 
 
 My cousin meditated, no doubt with his
 
 THE CRISIS 275 
 
 hands deep in his trouser pockets. " It is 
 illusion," he said. " It is a sort of glamour. 
 After all, look at it squarely. What is she ? 
 What can she give you ? She promises you 
 vague somethings. . . . She is a snare, she 
 is deception. She is the beautiful mask — " 
 He hesitated. 
 
 " Yes ?^' said Chatteris after a pause. 
 
 " She is — for you and all the realities of 
 life, she means — " 
 
 " Yes ? " 
 
 '•Death. . . ." 
 
 "Yes," said Chatteris. " I know." 
 
 And then again, " I know. 
 
 " There is nothing for me to learn about 
 that," he said. " But why — why should the 
 mask of death be beautiful? After all — 
 .... We get our duty by good hard 
 reasoning? Why should reason and justice 
 carry everything? Perhaps, after all, there 
 are things beyond our reason ; perhaps, after 
 all, Desire has a claim on us ? "
 
 276 THE SEA LADY 
 
 He stopped Interrogatively, and Melville 
 was profound. " I think," said my cousin at 
 last, " Desire has a claim on us. Beauty at 
 any rate — 
 
 ** I mean," he explained, "we are human 
 beings. We are matter with minds growing 
 out of ourselves. We reach downward 
 into the beautiful wonderland of matter, and 
 upward to something — ." He stopped, from 
 sheer dissatisfaction with the image. " In 
 another direction, anyhow," he tried feebly. 
 He jumped at something that was not quite 
 his meaning. "Man Is a sort of half-way 
 house — he must compromise." 
 
 " As you do? " 
 
 "Well. Yes. I try to strike a balance." 
 
 " A few old engravings, — good I suppose 
 — a little luxury in furniture and flowers, a 
 few things that come within your means, 
 Art — in moderation, and a few kindly acts 
 of the pleasanter sort, a certain respect for 
 truth, Duty — also in moderation. Eh? It's
 
 THE CRISIS 277 
 
 just that even balance that I cannot contrive. 
 I cannot sit down to the oatmeal of this 
 daily life and wash it down with a temperate 
 draught of Beauty and water. Art ! . . . 
 I suppose I'm voracious, I'm one of the 
 unfit — for the civilised stage. I've sat down 
 once, I've sat down twice, to perfectly sane, 
 secure, and reasonable things. . . . It's not 
 my way." 
 
 He repeated, " It's not my way." 
 Melville, I think, said nothing to that. He 
 was distracted from the immediate topic by 
 the discussion of his own way of living. He 
 was lost in egotistical comparisons. No 
 doubt he was on the verge of saying, as 
 most of us would have been under the 
 circumstances : ** I don't think you quite 
 understand my position." 
 
 " But, after all ! what is the good of talking 
 in this way ?" exclaimed Chatteris abruptly. 
 ** I am simply trying to elevate the whole 
 business by dragging in these wider questions.
 
 278 THE SEA LADY 
 
 It's justification, when I didn't mean to 
 justify. I have to choose between life 
 with Adeline and this Woman out of the 
 Sea." 
 
 "Who is death." 
 
 " How do I know she is death ? " 
 
 " But you said you had made your 
 choice ! " 
 
 " I have." 
 
 He seemed to recollect. 
 
 " I have," he corroborated. " I told you. 
 I am going back to see Miss Glendower 
 to-morrow. 
 
 "Yes." He recalled further portions of 
 what I believe was some prepared and 
 ready-phrased decision — some decision from 
 which the conversation had drifted. "The 
 plain and simple fact is this, the need of my 
 life is discipline, the habit of persistence, of 
 ignoring side issues and wandering thoughts. 
 Discipline ! " 
 
 'And Work."
 
 THE CRISIS 279 
 
 "Work, if you like to put it so; it's the 
 same thing. The trouble so far has been, I 
 haven't worked hard enough. I've stopped 
 to speak to the woman by the wayside. 
 I've paltered with compromise, and the other 
 thing has caught me. . . . I've got to 
 renounce it, that is all." 
 
 " It isn't that your work is contempt- 
 ible." 
 
 "By Jove! No. It's — arduous. It has 
 its dusty moments. There are places 
 to climb that are not only steep but 
 muddy — " 
 
 " The world wants leaders. It gives a 
 man of your class a great deal. Leisure. 
 Honour. Training and high tradi- 
 tions. . . ." 
 
 " And it expects something back. I know. 
 I am wrong — have been wrong, anyhow. 
 This dream has taken me wonderfully. And 
 I must renounce it. After all, it is not so 
 m.uch — to renounce a dream. It's no more
 
 280 THE SEA LADY 
 
 than deciding to live. There are big things 
 in the world for men to do." 
 
 Melville produced an elaborate conceit. 
 *' If there is no Venus Anadyomene," he 
 said, ''there is Michael and his Sword." 
 
 " The stern angel in armour ! But 
 then he had a good palpable dragon to 
 slash, and not his own Desires. And 
 our way nowadays is to arrange a deal 
 with the dragons somehow, raise the 
 Minimum Wage and get a better Housing 
 for the Working Classes by hook or by 
 crook, — give as much as we get." 
 
 Melville does not think that was a fair 
 treatment of his suggestion. 
 
 •• No," said Chatteris, " I've no doubt 
 about the choice. I'm going to fall in — with 
 the species ; I'm going to take my place in 
 the ranks in that great battle for the future 
 which is the meaning of life. I want a 
 moral cold bath, and I mean to take one. 
 This lax dalliance with dreams and desires
 
 THE CRISIS 281 
 
 must end. I will make a time-table for my 
 hours and a rule for my life, I will entangle 
 my honour in controversies, I will give myself 
 to Service, as a man should do. Clean- 
 handed work, struggle and performance." 
 
 '* And there is Miss Glendower, you 
 know." 
 
 "Rather!" said Chatteris, with a faint 
 touch of insincerity. " Tall and straight- 
 eyed and capable. By Jove ! if there's to 
 be no Venus Anadyomene, at any rate there 
 will be Pallas Athene. It is she who plays 
 the reconciler." 
 
 And then, to Melville's amazement, he said 
 these words : "// wont be so bad, you know" 
 
 Melville restrained a movement of im- 
 patience, he tells me, at that. 
 
 Then Chatteris, he says, broke into a 
 sort of speech. "The case is tried," he 
 said, "the judgment has been given. I 
 am that I am. I've been through it all 
 and worked it out. I am a man and I
 
 282 THE SEA LADY 
 
 must go a man's way. There is Desire, 
 the light and guide of the world, a beacon 
 on a headland blazing out. Let it burn ! 
 Let it burn ! The road runs near it and 
 by it — and past. . . . I've made my choice. 
 I've got to be a man, I've got to live a 
 man and die a man and carry the bur- 
 then of my class and time. There it is ! 
 I've had the Dream, but you see I keep 
 hold of reason. Here, with the flame 
 burning I renounce it. I make my 
 choice. . . . Renunciation! Always — re- 
 nunciation! That is life for all of us. We 
 have desires, only to deny them, senses 
 that we all must starve. We can live 
 only as a part of ourselves. Why should 
 / be exempt? For me she is evil. For 
 me she is death. . . . 
 
 " Only, why have I seen her face ? Why 
 have I heard her voice? . . ."
 
 VI 
 
 They walked out of the shadows and 
 up a long sloping path until Sandgate, 
 as a little line of lights, came into view 
 below. Presently they came out upon the 
 brow and walked together (the band play- 
 ing with a remote and sweetened indis- 
 tinctness far away behind them) towards 
 the cliff at the end. They stood for a 
 little while in silence looking down. Mel- 
 ville made a guess at his companion's 
 thoughts. 
 
 " Why not come down to-night ? " he 
 asked. 
 
 " On a night like this ! " Chatteris turned 
 about suddenly and regarded the moonlight 
 and the sea. He stood quite still for a space, 
 
 283
 
 284 THE SEA LADY 
 
 and that cold white radiance gave an illusory 
 strength and decision to his face. "No," 
 he said at last, and the word was almost a 
 sigh. 
 
 " Go down to the girl below there ? End 
 the thing. She will be there, thinking of 
 you—" 
 
 "No," said Chatteris, "No." 
 
 " It's not ten yet," Melville tried again. 
 
 Chatteris thought. "No," he answered, 
 "not to-night. To-morrow, in the light of 
 every-day. 
 
 " I want a good grey honest day," he 
 said, " with a south - west wind. . . . 
 These still soft nights ! How can you 
 expect me to do anything of that sort, 
 to-night ? " 
 
 And then he murmured as though he 
 found the word a satisfying word to repeat, 
 " Renunciation. 
 
 " By Jove ! " he said with the most astonish- 
 ing transition, " but this is a night out of
 
 THE CRISIS 285 
 
 fairyland ! Look at the lights of those 
 windows below there and then up — up into 
 this enormous blue of sky. And there, as 
 though it was fainting in this excess of 
 moonlight — shines one star."
 
 CHAPTER THE EIGHTH 
 MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT 
 
 I 
 
 T UST precisely what happened after that 
 I has been the most impossible thing to 
 disinter. I have given all the things 
 that Melville remembered were said, I have 
 linked them into a conversation and checked 
 them by my cousin's after-thoughts, and finally 
 I have read the whole thing over to him. 
 It is of course no verbatim rendering, but it 
 is, he says, closely after the manner of their 
 talk ; the gist was that, and things of that sort 
 were said. And when he left Chatteris he 
 fully believed the final and conclusive thing 
 was said. And then he says it came into 
 his head that, apart from and outside this 
 
 286
 
 MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT 287 
 
 settlement, there still remained a tangible 
 reality capable of action — the Sea Lady. 
 What was she going to do ? The thought 
 toppled him back in a web of perplexities 
 again. It carried him back in a state of 
 inconclusive interrogation past Lummidge's 
 Hotel. 
 
 The two men had gone back to the M^tro- 
 pole and had parted with a firm handclasp 
 outside the glare of the big doorway. Chat- 
 teris went straight in, Melville fancies, but 
 he is not sure. I understand Melville had 
 some private thinking to do on his own 
 account, and I conceive him walking away 
 in a state of profound preoccupation. After- 
 wards, when the fact that the Sea Lady 
 was not to be abolished by Renunciations 
 cropped up in his mind, he passed back 
 along the Leas as I have said. His incon- 
 clusive interrogations elicited at the utmost 
 that Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel 
 is singularly like any other hotel of its class.
 
 288 THE SEA LADY 
 
 Its windows told no secrets. And there 
 Melville's narrative ends. 
 
 With that my circumstantial record neces- 
 sarily comes to an end also. There are 
 sources, of course, and glimpses. Parker 
 refuses, unhappily — as I explained. The 
 chief of these sources are, firstly, Gooch, the 
 valet employed by Chatteris ; and, secondly, 
 the hall porter of Lummidge's Private and 
 Family Hotel. 
 
 The valet's evidence is precise, but has an 
 air of being irrelevant. He witnesses that 
 at a quarter past eleven he went up to ask 
 Chatteris if there was anything more to do 
 that night, and found him seated in an 
 arm-chair before the open window, with his 
 chin upon his hands, staring at nothing — 
 which, indeed, as Schopenhauer observes in 
 his crowning passage, is the whole of human 
 life. 
 
 " More to do ? " said Chatteris. 
 
 " Yessir," said the valet.
 
 MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT 289 
 
 "Nothing," said Chatteris, "absolutely 
 nothing." And the valet, finding this answer 
 quite satisfactory, wished him good-night and 
 departed. 
 
 Probably Chatteris remained in this atti- 
 tude for a considerable time — half an hour, 
 perhaps, or more. Slowly, it would seem, 
 his mood underwent a chang-e. At some 
 definite moment it must have been that his 
 lethargic meditation gave way to a strange 
 activity, to a sort of hysterical reaction 
 against his resolves and renunciations. 
 His first action seems to me grotesque 
 — and grotesquely pathetic. He went into 
 his dressing-room, and in the morning " his 
 does," said the valet, "was shied about as 
 though 'e'd lost a ticket." This poor wor- 
 shipper of beauty and the dream — shaved! 
 He shaved and washed and he brushed his 
 hair, and, so his valet testifies, one of the 
 brushes got ' shied ' behind the bed. Even 
 
 this throwing about of brushes seems to me 
 19
 
 290 THE SEA LADY 
 
 to do little or nothing to palliate his poor 
 human preoccupation with the toilette. He 
 changed his grey flannels — which suited 
 him very well — for his white ones, which 
 suited him extremely. He must deliber- 
 ately and conscientiously have made him- 
 self quite 'lovely,' as a schoolgirl would 
 have put it. 
 
 And having capped his great " Renuncia- 
 tion " by these proceedings, he seems to have 
 gone straight to Lummidge's Private and 
 Family Hotel and demanded to see the Sea 
 Lady. 
 
 She had retired. 
 
 This came from Parker, and was delivered 
 in a chilling manner by the hall porter. 
 
 Chatteris swore at the hall porter. " Tell 
 her I'm here," he said. 
 
 '• She's retired," said the hall porter with 
 official severity. 
 
 "Will you tell her I'm here?" said Chat- 
 teris, suddenly white.
 
 MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT 291 
 
 "What name, Sir?" said the hall porter, 
 in order, as he explains, " to avoid a frackass." 
 
 "Chatteris. Tell her I must see her now. 
 Do you hear, — now ? " 
 
 The hall porter went up to Parker, and 
 came half-way back. He wished to good- 
 ness he was not a hall porter. The manager 
 had gone out — it was a stagnant hour. He 
 decided to try Parker again ; he raised his 
 voice as he spoke to her. 
 
 The Sea Lady called to Parker from the 
 inner room. There was an interval of 
 tension. 
 
 I gather the Sea Lady put on a loose 
 wrap, and the faithful Parker either carried 
 her or sufficiently helped her from her bed- 
 room to the couch in the little sittine-room. 
 In the meanwhile the hall porter hovered on 
 the stairs, praying for the manager — prayers 
 that went unanswered — and Chatteris fumed 
 below. Then we have a glimpse of the Sea 
 Lady.
 
 292 THE SEA LADY 
 
 '* I see her just in the crack of the door," 
 said the porter, " as that maid of hers opened 
 it. She was raised up on her hands, and 
 turned so towards the door. Looking exactly 
 like this — " 
 
 And the hall porter, who has an Irish 
 type of face, short nose, long upper lip, and 
 all the rest of it, and who has further 
 neglected his dentist, projected his face sud- 
 denly, opened his eyes very wide, and slowly 
 curved his mouth into a fixed smile, and so 
 remained until he judged the effect on me 
 was complete. 
 
 Parker, a little flushed, but resolutely 
 flattening everything to the quality of the 
 commonplace, emerged upon him suddenly. 
 Miss Waters could see Mr. Chatteris for a 
 few minutes. She was emphatic with the 
 "Miss Waters," the more emphatic for all the 
 insurgent stress of the goddess, protestingly 
 emphatic. And Chatteris went up, white 
 and resolved, to that smiling expectant
 
 MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT 293 
 
 presence. No one witnessed their meeting 
 but Parker — assuredly Parker could not 
 resist seeing that, but Parker is silent — 
 Parker preserves a silence that rubies could 
 not break. 
 
 All I know is this much from the 
 porter : 
 
 "When I said she was up there and 
 would see him," he says, "the way he 
 rooshed up was outrageous. This is a 
 Private Family Hotel. Of course one sees 
 things at times even here, but — 
 
 " I couldn't find the manager to tell 'im," 
 said the hall porter. "And what was / 
 authorised to do ? 
 
 " For a bit they talked with the door 
 open, and then it was shut. That maid of 
 hers did it — I lay." 
 
 I asked an ignoble question. 
 
 "Couldn't ketch a word," said the hall 
 porter. " Dropped to whispers — instanter."
 
 II 
 
 And afterwards — 
 
 It was within ten minutes of one that 
 Parker, conferring an amount of decorum 
 on the request beyond the power of 
 any other Hving being, descended to 
 demand — of all conceivable things — the 
 bath-chair ! 
 
 "I got it," said the hall porter with 
 inimitable profundity. 
 
 And then, having let me realise the 
 fulness of that, he said, "They never used 
 it ! " 
 
 "No?" 
 
 " No ! He carried her down in his arms." 
 
 "And out?" 
 
 "And out!"
 
 MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT 295 
 
 He was difficult to follow In his description 
 of the Sea Lady. She wore her wrap, it 
 seems, and she was "like a statue" — what- 
 ever he may have meant by that. Certainly 
 not that she was impassive. "Only," said 
 the porter, "she was alive." One arm was 
 bare, I know, and her hair was down, a 
 tossing mass of gold. 
 
 " He looked, you know, like a man who's 
 screwed himself up. 
 
 " She had one hand holding his hair — yes, 
 holding his hair, with her fingers in among 
 it. . . . 
 
 " And v^hen she see my face she threw her 
 head back, laughing at me. 
 
 " As much as to say, ' Got 'im ! ' 
 
 " Laughed at me, she did. Bubblin' over." 
 
 I stood for a moment conceiving this 
 extraordinary picture. Then a question 
 occurred to me. 
 
 " Did >^^ 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
 
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