The Sea Lady Part 4

"But do you really mean----?"

"I've never tasted tea before. How do you think we can boil a kettle?"

"What a strange--what a wonderful world it must be!" cried Adeline. And Mrs. Bunting said: "I can hardly _imagine_ it without tea. It's worse than-- I mean it reminds me--of abroad."

Mrs. Bunting was in the act of refilling the Sea Lady's cup. "I suppose," she said suddenly, "as you're not used to it-- It won't affect your diges--" She glanced at Adeline and hesitated. "But it's China tea."

And she filled the cup.

"It's an inconceivable world to me," said Adeline. "Quite."

Her dark eyes rested thoughtfully on the Sea Lady for a s.p.a.ce.

"Inconceivable," she repeated, for, in that unaccountable way in which a whisper will attract attention that a turmoil fails to arouse, the tea had opened her eyes far more than the tail.

The Sea Lady looked at her with sudden frankness. "And think how wonderful all this must seem to _me_!" she remarked.

But Adeline's imagination was aroused for the moment and she was not to be put aside by the Sea Lady's terrestrial impressions. She pierced--for a moment or so--the ladylike serenity, the a.s.sumption of a terrestrial fas.h.i.+on of mind that was imposing so successfully upon Mrs. Bunting. "It must be," she said, "the strangest world." And she stopped invitingly....

She could not go beyond that and the Sea Lady would not help her.

There was a pause, a silent eager search for topics. Apropos of the Niphetos roses on the table they talked of flowers and Miss Glendower ventured: "You have your anemones too! How beautiful they must be amidst the rocks!"

And the Sea Lady said they were very pretty--especially the cultivated sorts....

"And the fishes," said Mrs. Bunting. "How wonderful it must be to see the fishes!"

"Some of them," volunteered the Sea Lady, "will come and feed out of one's hand."

Mrs. Bunting made a little coo of approval. She was reminded of chrysanthemum shows and the outside of the Royal Academy exhibition and she was one of those people to whom only the familiar is really satisfying. She had a momentary vision of the abyss as a sort of diverticulum of Piccadilly and the Temple, a place unexpectedly rational and comfortable. There was a kink for a time about a little matter of illumination, but it recurred to Mrs. Bunting only long after. The Sea Lady had turned from Miss Glendower's interrogative gravity of expression to the sunlight.

"The sunlight seems so golden here," said the Sea Lady. "Is it always golden?"

"You have that beautiful greenery-blue s.h.i.+mmer I suppose," said Miss Glendower, "that one catches sometimes ever so faintly in aquaria----"

"One lives deeper than that," said the Sea Lady. "Everything is phosph.o.r.escent, you know, a mile or so down, and it's like--I hardly know. As towns look at night--only brighter. Like piers and things like that."

"Really!" said Mrs. Bunting, with the Strand after the theatres in her head. "Quite bright?"

"Oh, quite," said the Sea Lady.

"But--" struggled Adeline, "is it never put out?"

"It's so different," said the Sea Lady.

"That's why it is so interesting," said Adeline.

"There are no nights and days, you know. No time nor anything of that sort."

"Now that's very queer," said Mrs. Bunting with Miss Glendower's teacup in her hand--they were both drinking quite a lot of tea absent-mindedly, in their interest in the Sea Lady. "But how do you tell when it's Sunday?"

"We don't--" began the Sea Lady. "At least not exactly--" And then--"Of course one hears the beautiful hymns that are sung on the pa.s.senger s.h.i.+ps."

"Of course!" said Mrs. Bunting, having sung so in her youth and quite forgetting something elusive that she had previously seemed to catch.

But afterwards there came a glimpse of some more serious divergence--a glimpse merely. Miss Glendower hazarded a supposition that the sea people also had their Problems, and then it would seem the natural earnestness of her disposition overcame her proper att.i.tude of ladylike superficiality and she began to ask questions. There can be no doubt that the Sea Lady was evasive, and Miss Glendower, perceiving that she had been a trifle urgent, tried to cover her error by expressing a general impression.

"I can't see it," she said, with a gesture that asked for sympathy. "One wants to see it, one wants to _be_ it. One needs to be born a mer-child."

"A mer-child?" asked the Sea Lady.

"Yes-- Don't you call your little ones----?"

"_What_ little ones?" asked the Sea Lady.

She regarded them for a moment with a frank wonder, the undying wonder of the Immortals at that perpetual decay and death and replacement which is the gist of human life. Then at the expression of their faces she seemed to recollect. "Of course," she said, and then with a transition that made pursuit difficult, she agreed with Adeline. "It _is_ different," she said. "It _is_ wonderful. One feels so alike, you know, and so different. That's just where it _is_ so wonderful. Do I look--?

And yet you know I have never had my hair up, nor worn a dressing gown before today."

"What do you wear?" asked Miss Glendower. "Very charming things, I suppose."

"It's a different costume altogether," said the Sea Lady, brus.h.i.+ng away a crumb.

Just for a moment Mrs. Bunting regarded her visitor fixedly. She had, I fancy, in that moment, an indistinct, imperfect glimpse of pagan possibilities. But there, you know, was the Sea Lady in her wrapper, so palpably a lady, with her pretty hair brought up to date and such a frank innocence in her eyes, that Mrs. Bunting's suspicions vanished as they came.

(But I am not so sure of Adeline.)

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE EPISODE OF THE VARIOUS JOURNALISTS

I

The remarkable thing is that the Buntings really carried out the programme Mrs. Bunting laid down. For a time at least they positively succeeded in converting the Sea Lady into a credible human invalid, in spite of the galaxy of witnesses to the lady's landing and in spite of the severe internal dissensions that presently broke out. In spite, moreover, of the fact that one of the maids--they found out which only long after--told the whole story under vows to her very superior young man who told it next Sunday to a rising journalist who was sitting about on the Leas maturing a descriptive article. The rising journalist was incredulous. But he went about enquiring. In the end he thought it good enough to go upon. He found in several quarters a vague but sufficient rumour of a something; for the maid's young man was a conversationalist when he had anything to say.

Finally the rising journalist went and sounded the people on the two chief Folkestone papers and found the thing had just got to them. They were inclined to pretend they hadn't heard of it, after the fas.h.i.+on of local papers when confronted by the abnormal, but the atmosphere of enterprise that surrounded the rising journalist woke them up. He perceived he had done so and that he had no time to lose. So while they engaged in inventing representatives to enquire, he went off and telephoned to the _Daily Gunfire_ and the _New Paper_. When they answered he was positive and earnest. He staked his reputation--the reputation of a rising journalist!

"I swear there's something up," he said. "Get in first--that's all."

He had some reputation, I say--and he had staked it. The _Daily Gunfire_ was sceptical but precise, and the _New Paper_ sprang a headline "A Mermaid at last!"

You might well have thought the thing was out after that, but it wasn't.

There are things one doesn't believe even if they are printed in a halfpenny paper. To find the reporters hammering at their doors, so to speak, and fended off only for a time by a proposal that they should call again; to see their incredible secret glaringly in print, did indeed for a moment seem a hopeless exposure to both the Buntings and the Sea Lady. Already they could see the story spreading, could imagine the imminent rush of intimate enquiries, the tripod strides of a mult.i.tude of cameras, the crowds watching the windows, the horrors of a great publicity. All the Buntings and Mabel were aghast, simply aghast.

Adeline was not so much aghast as excessively annoyed at this imminent and, so far as she was concerned, absolutely irrelevant publicity. "They will never dare--" she said, and "Consider how it affects Harry!" and at the earliest opportunity she retired to her own room. The others, with a certain disregard of her offence, sat around the Sea Lady's couch--she had scarcely touched her breakfast--and canva.s.sed the coming terror.

"They will put our photographs in the papers," said the elder Miss Bunting.