Герберт Джордж Уэллс
The Sea Lady
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.
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 fiancée, 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.
