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 shining 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 scraps 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.