I
Just precisely what happened after that has been the most impossible
thing to disinter. I have given all the things that Melville remembered
were said, I have linked them into a conversation and checked them by my
cousin's afterthoughts, and finally I have read the whole thing over to
him. It is of course no verbatim rendering, but it is, he says, closely
after the manner of their talk, the gist was that, and things of that
sort were said. And when he left Chatteris, he fully believed that the
final and conclusive thing was said. And then he says it came into his
head that, apart from and outside this settlement, there still remained
a tangible reality, capable of action, the Sea Lady. What was she going
to do? The thought toppled him back into a web of perplexities again. It
carried him back into a state of inconclusive interrogation past
Lummidge's Hotel.
The two men had gone back to the Metropole and had parted with a firm
handclasp outside the glare of the big doorway. Chatteris went straight
in, Melville fancies, but he is not sure. I understand Melville had
some private thinking to do on his own account, and I conceive him
walking away in a state of profound preoccupation. Afterwards the fact
that the Sea Lady was not to be abolished by renunciations, cropped up
in his mind, and he passed back along the Leas, as I have said. His
inconclusive interrogations elicited at the utmost that Lummidge's
Private and Family Hotel is singularly like any other hotel of its
class. Its windows tell no secrets. And there Melville's narrative ends.
With that my circumstantial record necessarily comes to an end also.
There are sources, of course, and glimpses. Parker refuses,
unhappily--as I explained. The chief of these sources are, first,
Gooch, the valet employed by Chatteris; and, secondly, the hall-porter
of Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel.
The valet's evidence is precise, but has an air of being irrelevant. He
witnesses that at a quarter past eleven he went up to ask Chatteris if
there was anything more to do that night, and found him seated in an
arm-chair before the open window, with his chin upon his hands, staring
at nothing--which, indeed, as Schopenhauer observes in his crowning
passage, is the whole of human life.
"More to do?" said Chatteris.
"Yessir," said the valet.
"Nothing," said Chatteris, "absolutely nothing." And the valet, finding
this answer quite satisfactory, wished him goodnight and departed.
Probably Chatteris remained in this attitude for a considerable
time--half an hour, perhaps, or more. Slowly, it would seem, his mood
underwent a change. At some definite moment it must have been that his
lethargic meditation gave way to a strange activity, to a sort of
hysterical reaction against all his resolves and renunciations. His
first action seems to me grotesque--and grotesquely pathetic. He went
into his dressing-room, and in the morning "his clo'es," said the valet,
"was shied about as though 'e'd lost a ticket." This poor worshipper of
beauty and the dream shaved! He shaved and washed and he brushed his
hair, and, his valet testifies, one of the brushes got "shied" behind
the bed. Even this throwing about of brushes seems to me to have done
little or nothing to palliate his poor human preoccupation with the
toilette. He changed his gray flannels--which suited him very well--for
his white ones, which suited him extremely. He must deliberately and
conscientiously have made himself quite "lovely," as a schoolgirl would
have put it.
And having capped his great "renunciation" by these proceedings, he
seems to have gone straight to Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel and
demanded to see the Sea Lady.
She had retired.
This came from Parker, and was delivered in a chilling manner by the
hall-porter.
Chatteris swore at the hall-porter. "Tell her I'm here," he said.
"She's retired," said the hall-porter with official severity.
"Will you tell her I'm here?" said Chatteris, suddenly white.
"What name, sir?" said the hall-porter, in order, as he explains, "to
avoid a frackass."
"Chatteris. Tell her I must see her now. Do you hear, _now_?"
The hall-porter went to Parker, and came half-way back. He wished to
goodness he was not a hall-porter. The manager had gone out--it was a
stagnant hour. He decided to try Parker again; he raised his voice.
The Sea Lady called to Parker from the inner room. There was an interval
of tension.
I gather that the Sea Lady put on a loose wrap, and the faithful Parker
either carried her or sufficiently helped her from her bedroom to the
couch in the little sitting-room. In the meanwhile the hall-porter
hovered on the stairs, praying for the manager--prayers that went
unanswered--and Chatteris fumed below. Then we have a glimpse of the Sea
Lady.
"I see her just in the crack of the door," said the porter, "as that
maid of hers opened it. She was raised up on her hands, and turned so
towards the door. Looking exactly like this----"
And the hall-porter, who has an Irish type of face, a short nose, long
upper lip, and all the rest of it, and who has also neglected his
dentist, projected his face suddenly, opened his eyes very wide, and
slowly curved his mouth into a fixed smile, and so remained until he
judged the effect on me was complete.
Parker, a little flushed, but resolutely flattening everything to the
quality of the commonplace, emerged upon him suddenly. Miss Waters could
see Mr. Chatteris for a few minutes. She was emphatic with the "Miss
Waters," the more emphatic for all the insurgent stress of the goddess,
protestingly emphatic. And Chatteris went up, white and resolved, to
that smiling expectant presence. No one witnessed their meeting but
Parker--assuredly Parker could not resist seeing that, but Parker is
silent--Parker preserves a silence that rubies could not break.
All I know, is this much from the porter:
"When I said she was up there and would see him," he says, "the way he
rooshed up was outrageous. This is a Private Family Hotel. Of course one
sees things at times even here, but----
"I couldn't find the manager to tell 'im," said the hall-porter. "And
what was _I_ authorised to do?
"For a bit they talked with the door open, and then it was shut. That
maid of hers did it--I lay."