The Sea Lady

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.

My cousin slackened his pace a little and came up and joined them. The conversation hung at his approach. Chatteris sat back a little, but there seemed no resentment and he sought a topic for the three to discuss in the books Melville carried.

“Books?” he said.

“For Miss Glendower,” said Melville.

“Oh!” said Chatteris.

“What are they about?” asked the Sea Lady.

“Land tenure,” said Melville.

“That’s hardly my subject,” said the Sea Lady, and Chatteris joined in her smile as if he saw a jest.

There was a little pause.

“You are contesting Hythe?” said Melville.

“Fate points that way,” said Chatteris.

“They threaten a dissolution for September.”

“It will come in a month,” said Chatteris, with the inimitable tone of one who knows.

“In that case we shall soon be busy.”

“And I may canvass,” said the Sea Lady. “I never have – ”

“Miss Waters,” explained Chatteris, “has been telling me she means to help us.” He met Melville’s eye frankly.

“It’s rough work, Miss Waters,” said Melville.

“I don’t mind that. It’s fun. And I want to help. I really do want to help – Mr. Chatteris.”

“You know, that’s encouraging.”

“I could go around with you in my bath chair?”

“It would be a picnic,” said Chatteris.

“I mean to help anyhow,” said the Sea Lady.

“You know the case for the plaintiff?” asked Melville.

She looked at him.

“You’ve got your arguments?”

“I shall ask them to vote for Mr. Chatteris, and afterwards when I see them I shall remember them and smile and wave my hand. What else is there?”

“Nothing,” said Chatteris, and shut the lid on Melville. “I wish I had an argument as good.”

“What sort of people are they here?” asked Melville. “Isn’t there a smuggling interest to conciliate?”

“I haven’t asked that,” said Chatteris. “Smuggling is over and past, you know. Forty years ago. It always has been forty years ago. They trotted out the last of the smugglers, – interesting old man, full of reminiscences, – when there was a count of the Saxon Shore. He remembered smuggling – forty years ago. Really, I doubt if there ever was any smuggling. The existing coast guard is a sacrifice to a vain superstition.”

“Why!” cried the Sea Lady. “Only about five weeks ago I saw quite near here – ”

She stopped abruptly and caught Melville’s eye. He grasped her difficulty.

“In a paper?” he suggested.

“Yes, in a paper,” she said, seizing the rope he threw her.

“Well?” asked Chatteris.

“There is smuggling still,” said the Sea Lady, with an air of some one who decides not to tell an anecdote that is suddenly found to be half forgotten.

“There’s no doubt it happens,” said Chatteris, missing it all. “But it doesn’t appear in the electioneering. I certainly sha’n’t agitate for a faster revenue cutter. However things may be in that respect, I take the line that they are very well as they are. That’s my line, of course.” And he looked out to sea. The eyes of Melville and the Sea Lady had an intimate moment.

“There, you know, is just a specimen of the sort of thing we do,” said Chatteris. “Are you prepared to be as intricate as that?”

“Quite,” said the Sea Lady.

My cousin was reminded of an anecdote.

The talk degenerated into anecdotes of canvassing, and ran shallow. My cousin was just gathering that Mrs. Bunting and Miss Bunting had been with the Sea Lady and had gone into the town to a shop, when they returned. Chatteris rose to greet them and explained – what had been by no means apparent before – that he was on his way to Adeline, and after a few further trivialities he and Melville went on together.

A brief silence fell between them.

“Who is that Miss Waters?” asked Chatteris.

“Friend of Mrs. Bunting,” prevaricated Melville.

“So I gather… She seems a very charming person.”

“She is.”

“She’s interesting. Her illness seems to throw her up. It makes a passive thing of her, like a picture or something that’s – imaginary. Imagined – anyhow. She sits there and smiles and responds. Her eyes – have something intimate. And yet – ”

My cousin offered no assistance.

“Where did Mrs. Bunting find her.”

My cousin had to gather himself together for a second or so.

“There’s something,” he said deliberately, “that Mrs. Bunting doesn’t seem disposed – ”

“What can it be?”

“It’s bound to be all right,” said Melville rather weakly.

“It’s strange, too. Mrs. Bunting is usually so disposed – ”

Melville left that to itself.

“That’s what one feels,” said Chatteris.

“What?”

“Mystery.”

My cousin shares with me a profound detestation of that high mystic method of treating women. He likes women to be finite – and nice. In fact, he likes everything to be finite – and nice. So he merely grunted.

But Chatteris was not to be stopped by that. He passed to a critical note. “No doubt it’s all illusion. All women are impressionists, a patch, a light. You get an effect. And that is all you are meant to get, I suppose. She gets an effect. But how – that’s the mystery. It’s not merely beauty. There’s plenty of beauty in the world. But not of these effects. The eyes, I fancy.”

He dwelt on that for a moment.

“There’s really nothing in eyes, you know, Chatteris,” said my cousin Melville, borrowing an alien argument and a tone of analytical cynicism from me. “Have you ever looked at eyes through a hole in a sheet?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Chatteris. “I don’t mean the mere physical eye… Perhaps it’s the look of health – and the bath chair. A bold discord. You don’t know what’s the matter, Melville?”

“How?”

“I gather from Bunting it’s a disablement – not a deformity.”

“He ought to know.”

“I’m not so sure of that. You don’t happen to know the nature of her disablement?”

“I can’t tell at all,” said Melville in a speculative tone. It struck him he was getting to prevaricate better.

The subject seemed exhausted. They spoke of a common friend whom the sight of the Métropole suggested. Then they did not talk at all for a time, until the stir and interest of the band stand was passed. Then Chatteris threw out a thought.

“Complex business – feminine motives,” he remarked.

“How?”

“This canvassing. She can’t be interested in philanthropic Liberalism.”

“There’s a difference in the type. And besides, it’s a personal matter.”

“Not necessarily, is it? Surely there’s not such an intellectual gap between the sexes! If you can get interested – ”

“Oh, I know.”

“Besides, it’s not a question of principles. It’s the fun of electioneering.”

“Fun!”

“There’s no knowing what won’t interest the feminine mind,” said Melville, and added, “or what will.”

Chatteris did not answer.

“It’s the district visiting instinct, I suppose,” said Melville. “They all have it. It’s the canvassing. All women like to go into houses that don’t belong to them.”

“Very likely,” said Chatteris shortly, and failing a reply from Melville, he gave way to secret meditations, it would seem still of a fairly agreeable sort.

The twelve o’clock gun thudded from Shornecliffe Camp.

“By Jove!” said Chatteris, and quickened his steps.

They found Adeline busy amidst her papers. As they entered she pointed reproachfully, yet with the protrusion of a certain Marcella-like undertone of sweetness, at the clock. The apologies of Chatteris were effusive and winning, and involved no mention of the Sea Lady on the Leas.

Melville delivered his books and left them already wading deeply into the details of the district organisation that the local Liberal organiser had submitted.

II

A little while after the return of Chatteris, my cousin Melville and the Sea Lady were under the ilex at the end of the sea garden and – disregarding Parker (as every one was accustomed to do), who was in a garden chair doing some afternoon work at a proper distance – there was nobody with them at all. Fred and the girls were out cycling – Fred had gone with them at the Sea Lady’s request – and Miss Glendower and Mrs. Bunting were at Hythe calling diplomatically on some rather horrid local people who might be serviceable to Harry in his electioneering.

Mr. Bunting was out fishing. He was not fond of fishing, but he was in many respects an exceptionally resolute little man, and he had taken to fishing every day in the afternoon after luncheon in order to break himself of what Mrs. Bunting called his “ridiculous habit” of getting sea-sick whenever he went out in a boat. He said that if fishing from a boat with pieces of mussels for bait after luncheon would not break the habit nothing would, and certainly it seemed at times as if it were going to break everything that was in him. But the habit escaped. This, however, is a digression.

These two, I say, were sitting in the ample shade under the evergreen oak, and Melville, I imagine, was in those fine faintly patterned flannels that in the year 1899 combined correctness with ease. He was no doubt looking at the shaded face of the Sea Lady, framed in a frame of sunlit yellow-green lawn and black-green ilex leaves – at least so my impulse for verisimilitude conceives it – and she at first was pensive and downcast that afternoon and afterwards she was interested and looked into his eyes. Either she must have suggested that he might smoke or else he asked. Anyhow, his cigarettes were produced. She looked at them with an arrested gesture, and he hung for a moment, doubtful, on her gesture.

“I suppose you – ” he said.

“I never learned.”

He glanced at Parker and then met the Sea Lady’s regard.

“It’s one of the things I came for,” she said.

He took the only course.

She accepted a cigarette and examined it thoughtfully. “Down there,” she said, “it’s just one of the things – You will understand we get nothing but saturated tobacco. Some of the mermen – There’s something they have picked up from the sailors. Quids, I think they call it. But that’s too horrid for words!”

She dismissed the unpleasant topic by a movement, and lapsed into thought.

My cousin clicked his match-box.

She had a momentary doubt and glanced towards the house. “Mrs. Bunting?” she asked. Several times, I understand, she asked the same thing.

“She wouldn’t mind – ” said Melville, and stopped.

“She won’t think it improper,” he amplified, “if nobody else thinks it improper.”

“There’s nobody else,” said the Sea Lady, glancing at Parker, and my cousin lit the match.

My cousin has an indirect habit of mind. With all general and all personal things his desperation to get at them obliquely amounts almost to a passion; he could no more go straight to a crisis than a cat could to a stranger. He came off at a tangent now as he was sitting forward and scrutinising her first very creditable efforts to draw. “I just wonder,” he said, “exactly what it was you did come for.”

She smiled at him over a little jet of smoke. “Why, this,” she said.

“And hairdressing?”

“And dressing.”

“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.”

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 – ”