The Sea Lady Part 2

"That's precisely it," said she.

My cousin Melville had a new light on an old topic. "And that's why--in the old time----?"

"Exactly!" she cried, "exactly! Before there were so many Excursionists and sailors and Low People about, one came out, one sat and brushed it in the sun. And then of course it really _was_ possible to do it up. But now----"

She made a petulant gesture and looked gravely at Melville, biting her lip the while. My cousin made a sympathetic noise. "The horrid modern spirit," he said--almost automatically....

But though fiction and fas.h.i.+on appear to be so regrettably dominant in the nourishment of the mer-mind, it must not be supposed that the most serious side of our reading never reaches the bottom of the sea. There was, for example, a case quite recently, the Sea Lady said, of the captain of a sailing s.h.i.+p whose mind had become unhinged by the huckstering uproar of the _Times_ and _Daily Mail_, and who had not only bought a second-hand copy of the _Times_ reprint of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but also that dense collection of literary snacks and samples, that All-Literature Sausage which has been compressed under the weighty editing of Doctor Richard Garnett. It has long been notorious that even the greatest minds of the past were far too copious and confusing in their--as the word goes--lubrications. Doctor Garnett, it is alleged, has seized the gist and presented it so compactly that almost any business man now may take hold of it without hindrance to his more serious occupations. The unfortunate and misguided seaman seems to have carried the entire collection aboard with him, with the pretty evident intention of coming to land in Sydney the wisest man alive--a Hindoo-minded thing to do. The result might have been antic.i.p.ated. The ma.s.s s.h.i.+fted in the night, threw the whole weight of the science of the middle nineteenth century and the literature of all time, in a virulently concentrated state, on one side of his little vessel and capsized it instantly....

The s.h.i.+p, the Sea Lady said, dropped into the abyss as if it were loaded with lead, and its crew and other movables did not follow it down until much later in the day. The captain was the first to arrive, said the Sea Lady, and it is a curious fact, due probably to some preliminary dippings into his purchase, that he came head first, instead of feet down and limbs expanded in the customary way....

However, such exceptional windfalls avail little against the rain of light literature that is constantly going on. The novel and the newspaper remain the world's reading even at the bottom of the sea. As subsequent events would seem to show, it must have been from the common latter-day novel and the newspaper that the Sea Lady derived her ideas of human life and sentiment and the inspiration of her visit. And if at times she seemed to underestimate the n.o.bler tendencies of the human spirit, if at times she seemed disposed to treat Adeline Glendower and many of the deeper things of life with a certain sceptical levity, if she did at last indisputably subordinate reason and right feeling to pa.s.sion, it is only just to her, and to those deeper issues, that we should ascribe her aberrations to their proper cause....

II

My cousin Melville, I was saying, did at one time or another get a vague, a very vague conception of what that deep-sea world was like. But whether his conception has any quality of truth in it is more than I dare say. He gives me an impression of a very strange world indeed, a green luminous fluidity in which these beings float, a world lit by great s.h.i.+ning monsters that drift athwart it, and by waving forests of nebulous luminosity amidst which the little fishes drift like netted stars. It is a world with neither sitting, nor standing, nor going, nor coming, through which its inhabitants float and drift as one floats and drifts in dreams. And the way they live there! "My dear man!" said Melville, "it must be like a painted ceiling!..."

I do not even feel certain that it is in the sea particularly that this world of the Sea Lady is to be found. But about those saturated books and drowned sc.r.a.ps of paper, you say? Things are not always what they seem, and she told him all of that, we must reflect, one laughing afternoon.

She could appear, at times, he says, as real as you or I, and again came mystery all about her. There were times when it seemed to him you might have hurt her or killed her as you can hurt and kill anyone--with a penknife for example--and there were times when it seemed to him you could have destroyed the whole material universe and left her smiling still. But of this ambiguous element in the lady, more is to be told later. There are wider seas than ever keel sailed upon, and deeps that no lead of human casting will ever plumb. When it is all summed up, I have to admit, I do not know, I cannot tell. I fall back upon Melville and my poor array of collected facts. At first there was amazingly little strangeness about her for any who had to deal with her. There she was, palpably solid and material, a lady out of the sea.

This modern world is a world where the wonderful is utterly commonplace.

We are bred to show a quiet freedom from amazement, and why should we boggle at material Mermaids, with Dewars solidifying all sorts of impalpable things and Marconi waves spreading everywhere? To the Buntings she was as matter of fact, as much a matter of authentic and reasonable motives and of sound solid sentimentality, as everything else in the Bunting world. So she was for them in the beginning, and so up to this day with them her memory remains.

III

The way in which the Sea Lady talked to Mrs. Bunting on that memorable morning, when she lay all wet and still visibly fishy on the couch in Mrs. Bunting's dressing-room, I am also able to give with some little fulness, because Mrs. Bunting repeated it all several times, acting the more dramatic speeches in it, to my cousin Melville in several of those good long talks that both of them in those happy days--and particularly Mrs. Bunting--always enjoyed so much. And with her very first speech, it seems, the Sea Lady took her line straight to Mrs. Bunting's generous managing heart. She sat up on the couch, drew the antimaca.s.sar modestly over her deformity, and sometimes looking sweetly down and sometimes openly and trustfully into Mrs. Bunting's face, and speaking in a soft clear grammatical manner that stamped her at once as no mere mermaid but a finished fine Sea Lady, she "made a clean breast of it," as Mrs.

Bunting said, and "fully and frankly" placed herself in Mrs. Bunting's hands.

"Mrs. Bunting," said Mrs. Bunting to my cousin Melville, in a dramatic rendering of the Sea Lady's manner, "do permit me to apologise for this intrusion, for I know it _is_ an intrusion. But indeed it has almost been _forced_ upon me, and if you will only listen to my story, Mrs.

Bunting, I think you will find--well, if not a complete excuse for me--for I can understand how exacting your standards must be--at any rate _some_ excuse for what I have done--for what I _must_ call, Mrs.

Bunting, my deceitful conduct towards you. Deceitful it was, Mrs.

Bunting, for I never had cramp-- But then, Mrs. Bunting"--and here Mrs.

Bunting would insert a long impressive pause--"I never had a mother!"

"And then and there," said Mrs. Bunting, when she told the story to my cousin Melville, "the poor child burst into tears and confessed she had been born ages and ages ago in some dreadful miraculous way in some terrible place near Cyprus, and had no more right to a surname-- Well, _there_--!" said Mrs. Bunting, telling the story to my cousin Melville and making the characteristic gesture with which she always pa.s.sed over and disowned any indelicacy to which her thoughts might have tended.

"And all the while speaking with such a nice accent and moving in such a ladylike way!"

"Of course," said my cousin Melville, "there are cla.s.ses of people in whom one excuses-- One must weigh----"

"Precisely," said Mrs. Bunting. "And you see it seems she deliberately chose _me_ as the very sort of person she had always wanted to appeal to. It wasn't as if she came to us haphazard--she picked us out. She had been swimming round the coast watching people day after day, she said, for quite a long time, and she said when she saw my face, watching the girls bathe--you know how funny girls are," said Mrs. Bunting, with a little deprecatory laugh, and all the while with a moisture of emotion in her kindly eyes. "She took quite a violent fancy to me from the very first."

"I can _quite_ believe _that_, at any rate," said my cousin Melville with unction. I know he did, although he always leaves it out of the story when he tells it to me. But then he forgets that I have had the occasional privilege of making a third party in these good long talks.

"You know it's most extraordinary and exactly like the German story,"

said Mrs. Bunting. "Oom--what is it?"

"Undine?"

"Exactly--yes. And it really seems these poor creatures are Immortal, Mr. Melville--at least within limits--creatures born of the elements and resolved into the elements again--and just as it is in the story--there's always a something--they have no Souls! No Souls at all! Nothing! And the poor child feels it. She feels it dreadfully. But in order to _get_ souls, Mr. Melville, you know they have to come into the world of men.

At least so they believe down there. And so she has come to Folkestone.

To get a soul. Of course that's her great object, Mr. Melville, but she's not at all fanatical or silly about it. Any more than _we_ are. Of course _we_--people who feel deeply----"

"Of course," said my cousin Melville, with, I know, a momentary expression of profound gravity, drooping eyelids and a hushed voice. For my cousin does a good deal with his soul, one way and another.

"And she feels that if she comes to earth at all," said Mrs. Bunting, "she _must_ come among _nice_ people and in a nice way. One can understand her feeling like that. But imagine her difficulties! To be a mere cause of public excitement, and silly paragraphs in the silly season, to be made a sort of show of, in fact--she doesn't want _any_ of it," added Mrs. Bunting, with the emphasis of both hands.

"What _does_ she want?" asked my cousin Melville.

"She wants to be treated exactly like a human being, to _be_ a human being, just like you or me. And she asks to stay with us, to be one of our family, and to learn how we live. She has asked me to advise her what books to read that are really nice, and where she can get a dress-maker, and how she can find a clergyman to sit under who would really be likely to understand her case, and everything. She wants me to advise her about it all. She wants to put herself altogether in my hands. And she asked it all so nicely and sweetly. She wants me to advise her about it all."

"Um," said my cousin Melville.

"You should have heard her!" cried Mrs. Bunting.

"Practically it's another daughter," he reflected.

"Yes," said Mrs. Bunting, "and even that did not frighten me. She admitted as much."

"Still----"

He took a step.

"She has means?" he inquired abruptly.

"Ample. She told me there was a box. She said it was moored at the end of a groin, and accordingly dear Randolph watched all through luncheon, and afterwards, when they could wade out and reach the end of the rope that tied it, he and Fred pulled it in and helped Fitch and the coachman carry it up. It's a curious little box for a lady to have, well made, of course, but of wood, with a s.h.i.+p painted on the top and the name of 'Tom' cut in it roughly with a knife; but, as she says, leather simply will _not_ last down there, and one has to put up with what one can get; and the great thing is it's _full_, perfectly full, of gold coins and things. Yes, gold--and diamonds, Mr. Melville. You know Randolph understands something-- Yes, well he says that box--oh!

I couldn't tell you _how_ much it isn't worth! And all the gold things with just a sort of faint reddy touch.... But anyhow, she is rich, as well as charming and beautiful. And really you know, Mr. Melville, altogether-- Well, I'm going to help her, just as much as ever I can.

Practically, she's to be our paying guest. As you know--it's no great secret between _us_--Adeline-- Yes.... She'll be the same. And I shall bring her out and introduce her to people and so forth. It will be a great help. And for everyone except just a few intimate friends, she is to be just a human being who happens to be an invalid--temporarily an invalid--and we are going to engage a good, trustworthy woman--the sort of woman who isn't astonished at anything, you know--they're a little expensive but they're to be got even nowadays--who will be her maid--and make her dresses, her skirts at any rate--and we shall dress her in long skirts--and throw something over It, you know----"

"Over----?"

"The tail, you know."

My cousin Melville said "Precisely!" with his head and eyebrows. But that was the point that hadn't been clear to him so far, and it took his breath away. Positively--a tail! All sorts of incorrect theories went by the board. Somehow he felt this was a topic not to be too urgently pursued. But he and Mrs. Bunting were old friends.

"And she really has ... a tail?" he asked.

"Like the tail of a big mackerel," said Mrs. Bunting, and he asked no more.

"It's a most extraordinary situation," he said.

"But what else _could_ I do?" asked Mrs. Bunting.

"Of course the thing's a tremendous experiment," said my cousin Melville, and repeated quite inadvertently, "_a tail!_"

Clear and vivid before his eyes, obstructing absolutely the advance of his thoughts, were the s.h.i.+ny clear lines, the oily black, the green and purple and silver, and the easy expansiveness of a mackerel's termination.