IV

I gather that after this talk Melville fell into an extraordinary net of

doubting. In the first place, and what was most distressing, he doubted

whether this conversation could possibly have happened at all, and if it

had whether his memory had not played him some trick in modifying and

intensifying the import of it all. My cousin occasionally dreams

conversations of so sober and probable a sort as to mingle quite

perplexingly with his real experiences. Was this one of these occasions?

He found himself taking up and scrutinising, as it were, first this

remembered sentence and then that. Had she really said this thing and

quite in this way? His memory of their conversation was never quite the

same for two days together. Had she really and deliberately foreshadowed

for Chatteris some obscure and mystical submergence?

What intensified and complicated his doubts most, was the Sea Lady's

subsequent serene freedom from allusion to anything that might or might

not have passed. She behaved just as she had always behaved; neither an

added intimacy nor that distance that follows indiscreet confidences

appeared in her manner.

And amidst this crop of questions arose presently quite a new set of

doubts, as if he were not already sufficiently equipped. The Sea Lady

alleged she had come to the world that lives on land, for Chatteris.

And then----?

He had not hitherto looked ahead to see precisely what would happen to

Chatteris, to Miss Glendower, to the Buntings or any one when, as seemed

highly probable, Chatteris was "got." There were other dreams, there was

another existence, an elsewhere--and Chatteris was to go there! So she

said! But it came into Melville's mind with a quite disproportionate

force and vividness that once, long ago, he had seen a picture of a man

and a mermaid, rushing downward through deep water.... Could it possibly

be that sort of thing in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-nine?

Conceivably, if she had said these things, did she mean them, and if she

meant them, and this definite campaign of capture was in hand, what was

an orderly, sane-living, well-dressed bachelor of the world to do?

Look on--until things ended in a catastrophe?

One figures his face almost aged. He appears to have hovered about the

house on the Sandgate Riviera to a scandalous extent, failing always to

get a sufficiently long and intimate tete-a-tete with the Sea Lady to

settle once for all his doubts as to what really had been said and what

he had dreamed or fancied in their talk. Never had he been so

exceedingly disturbed as he was by the twist this talk had taken. Never

had his habitual pose of humorous acquiescence in life been quite so

difficult to keep up. He became positively absent-minded. "You know if

it's like that, it's serious," was the burden of his private mutterings.

His condition was palpable even to Mrs. Bunting. But she misunderstood

his nature. She said something. Finally, and quite abruptly, he set off

to London in a state of frantic determination to get out of it all. The

Sea Lady wished him good-bye in Mrs. Bunting's presence as if there had

never been anything unusual between them.

I suppose one may contrive to understand something of his disturbance.

He had made quite considerable sacrifices to the world. He had, at great

pains, found his place and his way in it, he had imagined he had really

"got the hang of it," as people say, and was having an interesting time.

And then, you know, to encounter a voice, that subsequently insists upon

haunting you with "_There are better dreams_"; to hear a tale that

threatens complications, disasters, broken hearts, and not to have the

faintest idea of the proper thing to do.

But I do not think he would have bolted from Sandgate until he had

really got some more definite answer to the question, "_What_ better

dreams?" until he had surprised or forced some clearer illumination from

the passive invalid, if Mrs. Bunting one morning had not very tactfully

dropped a hint.

You know Mrs. Bunting, and you can imagine what she tactfully hinted.

Just at that time, what with her own girls and the Glendower girls, her

imagination was positively inflamed for matrimony; she was a matrimonial

fanatic; she would have married anybody to anything just for the fun of

doing it, and the idea of pairing off poor Melville to this mysterious

immortal with a scaly tail seems to have appeared to her the most

natural thing in the world.

_Apropos_ of nothing whatever I fancy she remarked, "Your opportunity is

now, Mr. Melville."

"My opportunity!" cried Melville, trying madly not to understand in the

face of her pink resolution.

"You've a monopoly now," she cried. "But when we go back to London with

her there will be ever so many people running after her."

I fancy Melville said something about carrying the thing too far. He

doesn't remember what he did say. I don't think he even knew at the

time.

However, he fled back to London in August, and was there so miserably at

loose ends that he had not the will to get out of the place. On this

passage in the story he does not dwell, and such verisimilitude as may

be, must be supplied by my imagination. I imagine him in his charmingly

appointed flat,--a flat that is light without being trivial, and

artistic with no want of dignity or sincerity,--finding a loss of

interest in his books, a loss of beauty in the silver he (not too

vehemently) collects. I imagine him wandering into that dainty little

bed-room of his and around into the dressing-room, and there, rapt in a

blank contemplation of the seven-and-twenty pairs of trousers (all

creasing neatly in their proper stretchers) that are necessary to his

conception of a wise and happy man. For every occasion he has learnt, in

a natural easy progress to knowledge, the exquisitely appropriate pair

of trousers, the permissible upper garment, the becoming gesture and

word. He was a man who had mastered his world. And then, you know, the

whisper:--

"_There are better dreams._"

"What dreams?" I imagine him asking, with a defensive note. Whatever

transparence the world might have had, whatever suggestion of something

beyond there, in the sea garden at Sandgate, I fancy that in Melville's

apartments in London it was indisputably opaque.

And "Damn it!" he cried, "if these dreams are for Chatteris, why should

she tell me? Suppose I had the chance of them-- Whatever they are----"

He reflected, with a terrible sincerity in the nature of his will.

"No!" And then again, "No!

"And if one mustn't have 'em, why should one know about 'em and be

worried by them? If she comes to do mischief, why shouldn't she do

mischief without making me an accomplice?"

He walks up and down and stops at last and stares out of his window on

the jaded summer traffic going Haymarket way.

He sees nothing of that traffic. He sees the little sea garden at

Sandgate and that little group of people very small and bright and

something--something hanging over them. "It isn't fair on them--or

me--or anybody!"

Then you know, quite suddenly, I imagine him swearing.

I imagine him at his luncheon, a meal he usually treats with a becoming

gravity. I imagine the waiter marking the kindly self-indulgence of his

clean-shaven face, and advancing with that air of intimate participation

the good waiter shows to such as he esteems. I figure the respectful

pause, the respectful enquiry.

"Oh, anything!" cries Melville, and the waiter retires amazed.

V

To add to Melville's distress, as petty discomforts do add to all

genuine trouble, his club-house was undergoing an operation, and was

full of builders and decorators; they had gouged out its windows and

gagged its hall with scaffolding, and he and his like were guests of a

stranger club that had several members who blew. They seemed never to do

anything but blow and sigh and rustle papers and go to sleep about the

place; they were like blight-spots on the handsome plant of this

host-club, and it counted for little with Melville, in the state he was

in, that all the fidgety breathers were persons of eminent position. But

it was this temporary dislocation of his world that brought him

unexpectedly into a _quasi_ confidential talk with Chatteris one

afternoon, for Chatteris was one of the less eminent and amorphous

members of this club that was sheltering Melville's club.

[Illustration: They seemed never to do anything but blow and sigh and

rustle papers.]

Melville had taken up _Punch_--he was in that mood when a man takes up

anything--and was reading, he did not know exactly what. Presently he

sighed, looked up, and discovered Chatteris entering the room.

He was surprised to see Chatteris, startled and just faintly alarmed,

and Chatteris it was evident was surprised and disconcerted to see him.

Chatteris stood in as awkward an attitude as he was capable of, staring

unfavourably, and for a moment or so he gave no sign of recognition.

Then he nodded and came forward reluctantly. His every movement

suggested the will without the wit to escape. "You here?" he said.

"What are you doing away from Hythe at this time?" asked Melville.

"I came here to write a letter," said Chatteris.

He looked about him rather helplessly. Then he sat down beside Melville

and demanded a cigarette. Suddenly he plunged into intimacy.

"It is doubtful whether I shall contest Hythe," he remarked.

"Yes?"

"Yes."

He lit his cigarette.

"Would you?" he asked.

"Not a bit of it," said Melville. "But then it's not my line."

"Is it mine?"

"Isn't it a little late in the day to drop it?" said Melville. "You've

been put up for it now. Every one's at work. Miss Glendower----"

"I know," said Chatteris.

"Well?"

"I don't seem to want to go on."

"My dear man!"

"It's a bit of overwork perhaps. I'm off colour. Things have gone flat.

That's why I'm up here."

He did a very absurd thing. He threw away a quarter-smoked cigarette and

almost immediately demanded another.

"You've been a little immoderate with your statistics," said Melville.

Chatteris said something that struck Melville as having somehow been

said before. "Election, progress, good of humanity, public spirit. None

of these things interest me really," he said. "At least, not just now."

Melville waited.

"One gets brought up in an atmosphere in which it's always being

whispered that one should go for a career. You learn it at your mother's

knee. They never give you time to find out what you really want, they

keep on shoving you at that. They form your character. They rule your

mind. They rush you into it."

"They didn't rush me," said Melville.

"They rushed me, anyhow. And here I am!"

"You don't want a career?"

"Well-- Look what it is."

"Oh! if you look at what things are!"

"First of all, the messing about to get into the House. These confounded

parties mean nothing--absolutely nothing. They aren't even decent

factions. You blither to damned committees of damned tradesmen whose

sole idea for this world is to get overpaid for their self-respect; you

whisper and hobnob with local solicitors and get yourself seen about

with them; you ask about the charities and institutions, and lunch and

chatter and chum with every conceivable form of human conceit and

pushfulness and trickery----"

He broke off. "It isn't as if _they_ were up to anything! They're

working in their way, just as you are working in your way. It's the same

game with all of them. They chase a phantom gratification, they toil and

quarrel and envy, night and day, in the perpetual attempt to persuade

themselves in spite of everything that they are real and a success----"

He stopped and smoked.

Melville was spiteful. "Yes," he admitted, "but I thought _your_

little movement was to be something more than party politics and

self-advancement----?"

He left his sentence interrogatively incomplete.

"The condition of the poor," he said.

"Well?" said Chatteris, regarding him with a sort of stony admission in

his blue eyes.

Melville dodged the look. "At Sandgate," he said, "there was, you know,

a certain atmosphere of belief----"

"I know," said Chatteris for the second time.

"That's the devil of it!" said Chatteris after a pause.

"If I don't believe in the game I'm playing, if I'm left high and dry on

this shoal, with the tide of belief gone past me, it isn't _my_

planning, anyhow. I know the decent thing I ought to do. I mean to do

it; in the end I mean to do it; I'm talking in this way to relieve my

mind. I've started the game and I must see it out; I've put my hand to

the plough and I mustn't go back. That's why I came to London--to get it

over with myself. It was running up against you, set me off. You caught

me at the crisis."

"Ah!" said Melville.

"But for all that, the thing is as I said--none of these things interest

me really. It won't alter the fact that I am committed to fight a

phantom election about nothing in particular, for a party that's been

dead ten years. And if the ghosts win, go into the Parliament as a

constituent spectre.... There it is--as a mental phenomenon!"

He reiterated his cardinal article. "The interest is dead," he said,

"the will has no soul."

He became more critical. He bent a little closer to Melville's ear. "It

isn't really that I don't believe. When I say I don't believe in these

things I go too far. I do. I know, the electioneering, the intriguing is

a means to an end. There is work to be done, sound work, and important

work. Only----"

Melville turned an eye on him over his cigarette end.

Chatteris met it, seemed for a moment to cling to it. He became absurdly

confidential. He was evidently in the direst need of a confidential ear.

"I don't want to do it. When I sit down to it, square myself down in the

chair, you know, and say, now for the rest of my life this is IT--this

is your life, Chatteris; there comes a sort of terror, Melville."

"H'm," said Melville, and turned away. Then he turned on Chatteris with

the air of a family physician, and tapped his shoulder three times as he

spoke. "You've had too much statistics, Chatteris," he said.

He let that soak in. Then he turned about towards his interlocutor, and

toyed with a club ash tray. "It's every day has overtaken you," he said.

"You can't see the wood for the trees. You forget the spacious design

you are engaged upon, in the heavy details of the moment. You are like a

painter who has been working hard upon something very small and exacting

in a corner. You want to step back and look at the whole thing."

"No," said Chatteris, "that isn't quite it."

Melville indicated that he knew better.

"I keep on, stepping back and looking at it," said Chatteris. "Just

lately I've scarcely done anything else. I'll admit it's a spacious and

noble thing--political work done well--only-- I admire it, but it

doesn't grip my imagination. That's where the trouble comes in."

"What _does_ grip your imagination?" asked Melville. He was absolutely

certain the Sea Lady had been talking this paralysis into Chatteris, and

he wanted to see just how far she had gone. "For example," he tested,

"are there--by any chance--other dreams?"

Chatteris gave no sign at the phrase. Melville dismissed his suspicion.

"What do you mean--other dreams?" asked Chatteris.

"Is there conceivably another way--another sort of life--some other

aspect----?"

"It's out of the question," said Chatteris. He added, rather remarkably,

"Adeline's awfully good."

My cousin Melville acquiesced silently in Adeline's goodness.

"All this, you know, is a mood. My life is made for me--and it's a very

good life. It's better than I deserve."

"Heaps," said Melville.

"Much," said Chatteris defiantly.

"Ever so much," endorsed Melville.

"Let's talk of other things," said Chatteris. "It's what even the street

boys call _mawbid_ nowadays to doubt for a moment the absolute final

all-this-and-nothing-else-in-the-worldishness of whatever you happen to

be doing."

My cousin Melville, however, could think of no other sufficiently

interesting topic. "You left them all right at Sandgate?" he asked,

after a pause.

"Except little Bunting."

"Seedy?"

"Been fishing."

"Of course. Breezes and the spring tides.... And Miss Waters?"

Chatteris shot a suspicious glance at him. He affected the offhand

style. "_She's_ quite well," he said. "Looks just as charming as ever."

"She really means that canvassing?"

"She's spoken of it again."

"She'll do a lot for you," said Melville, and left a fine wide pause.

Chatteris assumed the tone of a man who gossips.

"Who is this Miss Waters?" he asked.

"A very charming person," said Melville and said no more.

Chatteris waited and his pretence of airy gossip vanished. He became

very much in earnest.

"Look here," he said. "Who is this Miss Waters?"

"How should _I_ know?" prevaricated Melville.

"Well, you do know. And the others know. Who is she?"

Melville met his eyes. "Won't they tell you?" he asked.

"That's just it," said Chatteris.

"Why do you want to know?"

"Why shouldn't I know?"

"There's a sort of promise to keep it dark."

"Keep _what_ dark?"

My cousin gestured.

"It can't be anything wrong?" My cousin made no sign.

"She may have had experiences?"

My cousin reflected a moment on the possibilities of the deep-sea life.

"She has had them," he said.

"I don't care, if she has."

There came a pause.

"Look here, Melville," said Chatteris, "I want to know this. Unless it's

a thing to be specially kept from me.... I don't like being among a lot

of people who treat me as an outsider. What is this something about Miss

Waters?"

"What does Miss Glendower say?"

"Vague things. She doesn't like her and she won't say why. And Mrs.

Bunting goes about with discretion written all over her. And she

herself looks at you-- And that maid of hers looks-- The thing's

worrying me."

"Why don't you ask the lady herself?"

"How can I, till I know what it is? Confound it! I'm asking _you_

plainly enough."

"Well," said Melville, and at the moment he had really decided to tell

Chatteris. But he hung upon the manner of presentation. He thought in

the moment to say, "The truth is, she is a mermaid." Then as instantly

he perceived how incredible this would be. He always suspected Chatteris

of a capacity for being continental and romantic. The man might fly out

at him for saying such a thing of a lady.

A dreadful doubt fell upon Melville. As you know, he had never seen that

tail with his own eyes. In these surroundings there came to him such an

incredulity of the Sea Lady as he had not felt even when first Mrs.

Bunting told him of her. All about him was an atmosphere of solid

reality, such as one can breathe only in a first-class London club.

Everywhere ponderous arm-chairs met the eye. There were massive tables

in abundance and match-boxes of solid rock. The matches were of some

specially large, heavy sort. On a ponderous elephant-legged green baize

table near at hand were several copies of the _Times_, the current

_Punch_, an inkpot of solid brass, and a paper weight of lead. _There

are other dreams!_ It seemed impossible. The breathing of an eminent

person in a chair in the far corner became very distinct in that

interval. It was heavy and resolute like the sound of a stone-mason's

saw. It insisted upon itself as the touchstone of reality. It seemed to

say that at the first whisper of a thing so utterly improbable as a

mermaid it would snort and choke.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," said Melville.

"Well, tell me--anyhow."

My cousin looked at an empty chair beside him. It was evidently stuffed

with the very best horse-hair that money could procure, stuffed with

infinite skill and an almost religious care. It preached in the open

invitation of its expanded arms that man does not live by bread

alone--inasmuch as afterwards he needs a nap. An utterly dreamless

chair!

Mermaids?

He felt that he was after all quite possibly the victim of a foolish

delusion, hypnotised by Mrs. Bunting's beliefs. Was there not some more

plausible interpretation, some phrase that would lie out bridgeways from

the plausible to the truth?

"It's no good," he groaned at last.

Chatteris had been watching him furtively.

"Oh, I don't care a hang," he said, and shied his second cigarette into

the massively decorated fireplace. "It's no affair of mine."

Then quite abruptly he sprang to his feet and gesticulated with an

ineffectual hand.

"You needn't," he said, and seemed to intend to say many regrettable

things. Meanwhile until his intention ripened he sawed the air with his

ineffectual hand. I fancy he ended by failing to find a thing

sufficiently regrettable to express the pungency of the moment. He flung

about and went towards the door.

"Don't!" he said to the back of the newspaper of the breathing member.

"If you don't want to," he said to the respectful waiter at the door.

The hall-porter heard that he didn't care--he was damned if he did!

"He might be one of these here guests," said the hall-porter, greatly

shocked. "That's what comes of lettin' 'em in so young."