The Sea Lady

“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. Phœnician 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.”