I
There with as much verisimilitude as I can give it, is how the
Folkestone mermaid really came to land. There can be no doubt that the
whole affair was a deliberately planned intrusion upon her part. She
never had cramp, she couldn't have cramp, and as for drowning, nobody
was near drowning for a moment except Mr. Bunting, whose valuable life
she very nearly sacrificed at the outset of her adventure. And her next
proceeding was to demand an interview with Mrs. Bunting and to presume
upon her youthful and glowing appearance to gain the support, sympathy
and assistance of that good-hearted lady (who as a matter of fact was a
thing of yesterday, a mere chicken in comparison with her own immemorial
years) in her extraordinary raid upon Humanity.
Her treatment of Mrs. Bunting would be incredible if we did not know
that, in spite of many disadvantages, the Sea Lady was an extremely well
read person. She admitted as much in several later conversations with my
cousin Melville. For a time there was a friendly intimacy--so Melville
always preferred to present it--between these two, and my cousin, who
has a fairly considerable amount of curiosity, learnt many very
interesting details about the life "out there" or "down there"--for the
Sea Lady used either expression. At first the Sea Lady was exceedingly
reticent under the gentle insistence of his curiosity, but after a time,
I gather, she gave way to bursts of cheerful confidence. "It is clear,"
says my cousin, "that the old ideas of the submarine life as a sort of
perpetual game of 'who-hoop' through groves of coral, diversified by
moonlight hair-combings on rocky strands, need very extensive
modification." In this matter of literature, for example, they have
practically all that we have, and unlimited leisure to read it in.
Melville is very insistent upon and rather envious of that unlimited
leisure. A picture of a mermaid swinging in a hammock of woven seaweed,
with what bishops call a "latter-day" novel in one hand and a sixteen
candle-power phosphorescent fish in the other, may jar upon one's
preconceptions, but it is certainly far more in accordance with the
picture of the abyss she printed on his mind. Everywhere Change works
her will on things. Everywhere, and even among the immortals, Modernity
spreads. Even on Olympus I suppose there is a Progressive party and a
new Phaeton agitating to supersede the horses of his father by some
solar motor of his own. I suggested as much to Melville and he said
"Horrible! Horrible!" and stared hard at my study fire. Dear old
Melville! She gave him no end of facts about Deep Sea Reading.
Of course they do not print books "out there," for the printer's ink
under water would not so much run as fly--she made that very plain; but
in one way or another nearly the whole of terrestrial literature, says
Melville, has come to them. "We know," she said. They form indeed a
distinct reading public, and additions to their vast submerged library
that circulates forever with the tides, are now pretty systematically
sought. The sources are various and in some cases a little odd. Many
books have been found in sunken ships. "Indeed!" said Melville. There is
always a dropping and blowing overboard of novels and magazines from
most passenger-carrying vessels--sometimes, but these are not as a rule
valuable additions--a deliberate shying overboard. But sometimes books
of an exceptional sort are thrown over when they are quite finished.
(Melville is a dainty irritable reader and no doubt he understood that.)
From the sea beaches of holiday resorts, moreover, the lighter sorts of
literature are occasionally getting blown out to sea. And so soon as the
Booms of our great Popular Novelists are over, Melville assured me, the
libraries find it convenient to cast such surplus copies of their
current works as the hospitals and prisons cannot take, below high-water
mark.
"That's not generally known," said I.
"_They_ know it," said Melville.
In other ways the beaches yield. Young couples who "begin to sit
heapy," the Sea Lady told my cousin, as often as not will leave
excellent modern fiction behind them, when at last they return to their
proper place. There is a particularly fine collection of English work,
it seems, in the deep water of the English Channel; practically the
whole of the Tauchnitz Library is there, thrown overboard at the last
moment by conscientious or timid travellers returning from the
continent, and there was for a time a similar source of supply of
American reprints in the Mersey, but that has fallen off in recent
years. And the Deep Sea Mission for Fishermen has now for some years
been raining down tracts and giving a particularly elevated tone of
thought to the extensive shallows of the North Sea. The Sea Lady was
very precise on these points.
When one considers the conditions of its accumulation, one is not
surprised to hear that the element of fiction is as dominant in this
Deep Sea Library as it is upon the counters of Messrs. Mudie; but my
cousin learnt that the various illustrated magazines, and particularly
the fashion papers, are valued even more highly than novels, are looked
for far more eagerly and perused with envious emotion. Indeed on that
point my cousin got a sudden glimpse of one of the motives that had
brought this daring young lady into the air. He made some sort of
suggestion. "We should have taken to dressing long ago," she said, and
added, with a vague quality of laughter in her tone, "it isn't that
we're unfeminine, Mr. Melville. Only--as I was explaining to Mrs.
Bunting, one must consider one's circumstances--how _can_ one _hope_ to
keep anything nice under water? Imagine lace!"
"Soaked!" said my cousin Melville.
"Drenched!" said the Sea Lady.
"Ruined!" said my cousin Melville.
"And then you know," said the Sea Lady very gravely, "one's hair!"
"Of course," said Melville. "Why!--you can never get it _dry_!"
"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 fashion 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 ship 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 anticipated. The
mass shifted 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 ship, 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 nobler 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
passion, it is only just to her, and to those deeper issues, that we
should ascribe her aberrations to their proper cause....