For a moment it seemed to Melville that he had been addressed by
something quite other than the pleasant lady in the bath chair before
him. "But how--?" he began and stopped. He remained silent with a
perplexed face. She leaned back and glanced away from him, and when at
last she turned and spoke again, specific realities closed in on him
once more.
"Why shouldn't I," she asked, "if I want to?"
"Shouldn't what?"
"If I fancy Chatteris."
"One might think of obstacles," he reflected.
"He's not hers," she said.
"In a way, he's trying to be," said Melville.
"Trying to be! He has to be what he is. Nothing can make him hers. If
you weren't dreaming you would see that." My cousin was silent. "She's
not _real_," she went on. "She's a mass of fancies and vanities. She
gets everything out of books. She gets herself out of a book. You can
see her doing it here.... What is she seeking? What is she trying to
do? All this work, all this political stuff of hers? She talks of the
condition of the poor! What is the condition of the poor? A dreary
tossing on the bed of existence, a perpetual fear of consequences that
perpetually distresses them. Lives of anxiety they lead, because they do
not know what a dream the whole thing is. Suppose they were not anxious
and afraid.... And what does she care for the condition of the poor,
after all? It is only a point of departure in her dream. In her heart
she does not want their dreams to be happier, in her heart she has no
passion for them, only her dream is that she should be prominently doing
good, asserting herself, controlling their affairs amidst thanks and
praise and blessings. _Her_ dream! Of serious things!--a rout of
phantoms pursuing a phantom ignis fatuus--the afterglow of a mirage.
Vanity of vanities----"
"It's real enough to her."
"As real as she can make it, you know. But she isn't real herself. She
begins badly."
"And he, you know----"
"He doesn't believe in it."
"I'm not so sure."
"I am--now."
"He's a complicated being."
"He will ravel out," said the Sea Lady.
"I think you misjudge him about that work of his, anyhow," said
Melville. "He's a man rather divided against himself." He added
abruptly, "We all are." He recovered himself from the generality. "It's
vague, I admit, a sort of vague wish to do something decent, you know,
that he has----"
"A sort of vague wish," she conceded; "but----"
"He means well," said Melville, clinging to his proposition.
"He means nothing. Only very dimly he suspects----"
"Yes?"
"What you too are beginning to suspect.... That other things may be
conceivable even if they are not possible. That this life of yours is
not everything. That it is not to be taken too seriously. Because ...
there are better dreams!"
The song of the sirens was in her voice; my cousin would not look at her
face. "I know nothing of any other dreams," he said. "One has oneself
and this life, and that is enough to manage. What other dreams can there
be? Anyhow, we are in the dream--we have to accept it. Besides, you
know, that's going off the question. We were talking of Chatteris, and
why you have come for him. Why should you come, why should any one
outside come--into this world?"
"Because we are permitted to come--we immortals. And why, if we choose
to do so, and taste this life that passes and continues, as rain that
falls to the ground, why should we not do it? Why should we abstain?"
"And Chatteris?"
"If he pleases me."
He roused himself to a Titanic effort against an oppression that was
coming over him. He tried to get the thing down to a definite small
case, an incident, an affair of considerations. "But look here, you
know," he said. "What precisely do you mean to do if you get him? You
don't seriously intend to keep up the game to that extent. You don't
mean--positively, in our terrestrial fashion, you know--to marry him?"
The Sea Lady laughed at his recovery of the practical tone. "Well, why
not?" she asked.
"And go about in a bath chair, and-- No, that's not it. What _is_ it?"
He looked up into her eyes, and it was like looking into deep water.
Down in that deep there stirred impalpable things. She smiled at him.
"No!" she said, "I sha'n't marry him and go about in a bath chair. And
grow old as all earthly women must. (It's the dust, I think, and the
dryness of the air, and the way you begin and end.) You burn too fast,
you flare and sink and die. This life of yours!--the illnesses and the
growing old! When the skin wears shabby, and the light is out of the
hair, and the teeth-- Not even for love would I face it. No.... But
then you know--" Her voice sank to a low whisper. "_There are better
dreams._"
"What dreams?" rebelled Melville. "What do you mean? What are you? What
do you mean by coming into this life--you who pretend to be a woman--and
whispering, whispering ... to us who are in it, to us who have no
escape."
"But there is an escape," said the Sea Lady.
"How?"
"For some there is an escape. When the whole life rushes to a moment--"
And then she stopped. Now there is clearly no sense in this sentence to
my mind, even from a lady of an essentially imaginary sort, who comes
out of the sea. How can a whole life rush to a moment? But whatever it
was she really did say, there is no doubt she left it half unsaid.
He glanced up at her abrupt pause, and she was looking at the house.
* * * * *
"Do ... ris! Do ... ris! Are you there?" It was Mrs. Bunting's voice
floating athwart the lawn, the voice of the ascendant present, of
invincibly sensible things. The world grew real again to Melville. He
seemed to wake up, to start back from some delusive trance that crept
upon him.
He looked at the Sea Lady as if he were already incredulous of the
things they had said, as if he had been asleep and dreamed the talk.
Some light seemed to go out, some fancy faded. His eye rested upon the
inscription, "Flamps, Bath Chair Proprietor," just visible under her
arm.
"We've got perhaps a little more serious than--" he said doubtfully, and
then, "What you have been saying--did you exactly mean----?"
The rustle of Mrs. Bunting's advance became audible, and Parker moved
and coughed.