The Sea Lady

“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 Métropole 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.