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