So it was _Haploteuthis ferox_ made its appearance upon the Devonshire
coast. So far, this has been its most serious aggression. Mr. Fison’s
account, taken together with the wave of boating and bathing casualties
to which I have already alluded, and the absence of fish from the
Cornish coasts that year, points clearly to a shoal of these voracious
deep-sea monsters prowling slowly along the sub-tidal coast-line. Hunger
migration has, I know, been suggested as the force that drove them
hither; but, for my own part, I prefer to believe the alternative theory
of Hemsley. Hemsley holds that a pack or shoal of these creatures may
have become enamoured of human flesh by the accident of a foundered ship
sinking among them, and have wandered in search of it out of their
accustomed zone; first waylaying and following ships, and so coming to
our shores in the wake of the Atlantic traffic. But to discuss Hemsley’s
cogent and admirably-stated arguments would be out of place here.
It would seem that the appetites of the shoal were satisfied by the
catch of eleven people—for so far as can be ascertained, there were ten
people in the second boat, and certainly these creatures gave no further
signs of their presence off Sidmouth that day. The coast between Seaton
and Budleigh Salterton was patrolled all that evening and night by four
Preventive Service boats, the men in which were armed with harpoons and
cutlasses, and as the evening advanced, a number of more or less
similarly equipped expeditions, organised by private individuals, joined
them. Mr. Fison took no part in any of these expeditions.
About midnight excited hails were heard from a boat about a couple of
miles out at sea to the south-east of Sidmouth, and a lantern was seen
waving in a strange manner to and fro and up and down. The nearer boats
at once hurried towards the alarm. The venturesome occupants of the
boat, a seaman, a curate, and two schoolboys, had actually seen the
monsters passing under their boat. The creatures, it seems, like most
deep-sea organisms, were phosphorescent, and they had been floating,
five fathoms deep or so, like creatures of moonshine through the
blackness of the water, their tentacles retracted and as if asleep,
rolling over and over, and moving slowly in a wedge-like formation
towards the south-east.
These people told their story in gesticulated fragments, as first one
boat drew alongside and then another. At last there was a little fleet
of eight or nine boats collected together, and from them a tumult, like
the chatter of a marketplace, rose into the stillness of the night.
There was little or no disposition to pursue the shoal, the people had
neither weapons nor experience for such a dubious chase, and
presently—even with a certain relief, it may be—the boats turned
shoreward.
And now to tell what is perhaps the most astonishing fact in this whole
astonishing raid. We have not the slightest knowledge of the subsequent
movements of the shoal, although the whole southwest coast was now alert
for it. But it may, perhaps, be significant that a cachalot was stranded
off Sark on June 3. Two weeks and three days after this Sidmouth affair,
a living _Haploteuthis_ came ashore on Calais sands. It was alive,
because several witnesses saw its tentacles moving in a convulsive way.
But it is probable that it was dying. A gentleman named Pouchet obtained
a rifle and shot it.
That was the last appearance of a living _Haploteuthis_. No others were
seen on the French coast. On the 15th of June a dead body, almost
complete, was washed ashore near Torquay, and a few days later a boat
from the Marine Biological station, engaged in dredging off Plymouth,
picked up a rotting specimen, slashed deeply with a cutlass wound. How
the former specimen had come by its death it is impossible to say. And
on the last day of June, Mr. Egbert Caine, an artist, bathing near
Newlyn, threw up his arms, shrieked, and was drawn under. A friend
bathing with him made no attempt to save him, but swam at once for the
shore. This is the last fact to tell of this extraordinary raid from the
deeper sea. Whether it is really the last of these horrible creatures it
is, as yet, premature to say. But it is believed, and certainly it is to
be hoped, that they have returned now, and returned for good, to the
sunless depths of the middle seas, out of which they have so strangely
and so mysteriously arisen.
IN THE MODERN VEIN
AN UNSYMPATHETIC LOVE STORY
Of course the cultivated reader has heard of Aubrey Vair. He has
published on three several occasions volumes of delicate verses,—some,
indeed, border on indelicacy,—and his column “Of Things Literary” in the
“Climax” is well known. His Byronic visage and an interview have
appeared in the “Perfect Lady.” It was Aubrey Vair, I believe, who
demonstrated that the humour of Dickens was worse than his sentiment,
and who detected “a subtle bourgeois flavour” in Shakespeare. However,
it is not generally known that Aubrey Vair has had erotic experiences as
well as erotic inspirations. He adopted Goethe some little time since as
his literary prototype, and that may have had something to do with his
temporary lapse from sexual integrity.
For it is one of the commonest things that undermine literary men,
giving us landslips and picturesque effects along the otherwise even
cliff of their respectable life, ranking next to avarice, and certainly
above drink, this instability called genius, or, more fully, the
consciousness of genius, such as Aubrey Vair possessed. Since Shelley
set the fashion, your man of gifts has been assured that his duty to
himself and his duty to his wife are incompatible, and his renunciation
of the Philistine has been marked by such infidelity as his means and
courage warranted. Most virtue is lack of imagination. At any rate, a
minor genius without his affections twisted into an inextricable muddle,
and who did not occasionally shed sonnets over his troubles, I have
never met.
Even Aubrey Vair did this, weeping the sonnets overnight into his
blotting-book, and pretending to write literary _causerie_ when his wife
came down in her bath slippers to see what kept him up. She did not
understand him, of course. He did this even before the other woman
appeared, so ingrained is conjugal treachery in the talented mind.
Indeed, he wrote more sonnets before the other woman came than after
that event, because thereafter he spent much of his leisure in cutting
down the old productions, retrimming them, and generally altering this
ready-made clothing of his passion to suit her particular height and
complexion.
Aubrey Vair lived in a little red villa with a lawn at the back and a
view of the Downs behind Reigate. He lived upon discreet investment eked
out by literary work. His wife was handsome, sweet, and gentle, and—such
is the tender humility of good married women—she found her life’s
happiness in seeing that little Aubrey Vair had well-cooked variety for
dinner, and that their house was the neatest and brightest of all the
houses they entered. Aubrey Vair enjoyed the dinners, and was proud of
the house, yet nevertheless he mourned because his genius dwindled.
Moreover, he grew plump, and corpulence threatened him.
We learn in suffering what we teach in song, and Aubrey Vair knew
certainly that his soul could give no creditable crops unless his
affections were harrowed. And how to harrow them was the trouble, for
Reigate is a moral neighbourhood.
So Aubrey Vair’s romantic longings blew loose for a time, much as a
seedling creeper might, planted in the midst of a flower-bed. But at
last, in the fulness of time, the other woman came to the embrace of
Aubrey Vair’s yearning heart-tendrils, and his romantic episode
proceeded as is here faithfully written down.
The other woman was really a girl, and Aubrey Vair met her first at a
tennis party at Redhill. Aubrey Vair did not play tennis after the
accident to Miss Morton’s eye, and because latterly it made him pant and
get warmer and moister than even a poet should be; and this young lady
had only recently arrived in England, and could not play. So they
gravitated into the two vacant basket chairs beside Mrs. Bayne’s deaf
aunt, in front of the hollyhocks, and were presently talking at their
ease together.
The other woman’s name was unpropitious,—Miss Smith,—but you would never
have suspected it from her face and costume. Her parentage was
promising, she was an orphan, her mother was a Hindoo, and her father an
Indian civil servant; and Aubrey Vair—himself a happy mixture of Kelt
and Teuton, as, indeed, all literary men have to be nowadays—naturally
believed in the literary consequences of a mixture of races. She was
dressed in white. She had finely moulded, pale features, great depth of
expression, and a cloud of delicately _frisé_ black hair over her dark
eyes, and she looked at Aubrey Vair with a look half curious and half
shy, that contrasted admirably with the stereotyped frankness of your
common Reigate girl.
“This is a splendid lawn—the best in Redhill,” said Aubrey Vair, in the
course of the conversation; “and I like it all the better because the
daisies are spared.” He indicated the daisies with a graceful sweep of
his rather elegant hand.
“They are sweet little flowers,” said the lady in white, “and I have
always associated them with England, chiefly, perhaps, through a picture
I saw ‘over there’ when I was very little, of children making daisy
chains. I promised myself that pleasure when I came home. But, alas! I
feel now rather too large for such delights.”
“I do not see why we should not be able to enjoy these simple pleasures
as we grow older—why our growth should have in it so much forgetting.
For my own part—”
“Has your wife got Jane’s recipe for stuffing trout?” asked Mrs. Bayne’s
deaf aunt, abruptly.
“I really don’t know,” said Aubrey Vair.
“That’s all right,” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt. “It ought to please
even you.”
“Anything will please me,” said Aubrey Vair; “I care very little—”
“Oh, it’s a lovely dish,” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt, and relapsed into
contemplation.
“I was saying,” said Aubrey Vair, “that I think I still find my keenest
pleasures in childish pastimes. I have a little nephew that I see a
great deal of, and when we fly kites together, I am sure it would be
hard to tell which of us is the happier. By-the-by, you should get at
your daisy chains in that way. Beguile some little girl.”
“But I did. I took that Morton mite for a walk in the meadows, and
timidly broached the subject. And she reproached me for suggesting
‘frivolous pursuits.’ It was a horrible disappointment.”
“The governess here,” said Aubrey Vair, “is robbing that child of its
youth in a terrible way. What will a life be that has no childhood at
the beginning?
“Some human beings are never young,” he continued, “and they never grow
up. They lead absolutely colourless lives. They are—they are etiolated.
They never love, and never feel the loss of it. They are—for the moment
I can think of no better image—they are human flowerpots, in which no
soul has been planted. But a human soul properly growing must begin in a
fresh childishness.”
“Yes,” said the dark lady, thoughtfully, “a careless childhood, running
wild almost. That should be the beginning.”
“Then we pass through the wonder and diffidence of youth.”
“To strength and action,” said the dark lady. Her dreamy eyes were fixed
on the Downs, and her fingers tightened on her knees as she spoke. “Ah,
it is a grand thing to live—as a man does—self-reliant and free.”
“And so at last,” said Aubrey Vair, “come to the culmination and crown
of life.” He paused and glanced hastily at her. Then he dropped his
voice almost to a whisper—“And the culmination of life is love.”
Their eyes met for a moment, but she looked away at once. Aubrey Vair
felt a peculiar thrill and a catching in his breath, but his emotions
were too complex for analysis. He had a certain sense of surprise, also,
at the way his conversation had developed.
Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt suddenly dug him in the chest with her
ear-trumpet, and some one at tennis bawled, “Love all!”
“Did I tell you Jane’s girls have had scarlet fever?” asked Mrs. Bayne’s
deaf aunt.
“No,” said Aubrey Vair.
“Yes; and they are peeling now,” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt, shutting
her lips tightly, and nodding in a slow, significant manner at both of
them.
There was a pause. All three seemed lost in thought, too deep for words.
“Love,” began Aubrey Vair, presently, in a severely philosophical tone,
leaning back in his chair, holding his hands like a praying saint’s in
front of him, and staring at the toe of his shoe,—“love is, I believe,
the one true and real thing in life. It rises above reason, interest, or
explanation. Yet I never read of an age when it was so much forgotten as
it is now. Never was love expected to run so much in appointed channels,
never was it so despised, checked, ordered, and obstructed. Policemen
say, ‘This way, Eros!’ As a result, we relieve our emotional
possibilities in the hunt for gold and notoriety. And after all, with
the best fortune in these, we only hold up the gilded images of our
success, and are weary slaves, with unsatisfied hearts, in the pageant
of life.”
Aubrey Vair sighed, and there was a pause. The girl looked at him out of
the mysterious darkness of her eyes. She had read many books, but Aubrey
Vair was her first literary man, and she took this kind of thing for
genius—as girls have done before.
“We are,” continued Aubrey Vair, conscious of a favourable
impression,—“we are like fireworks, mere dead, inert things until the
appointed spark comes; and then—if it is not damp—the dormant soul
blazes forth in all its warmth and beauty. That is living. I sometimes
think, do you know, that we should be happier if we could die soon after
that golden time, like the Ephemerides. There is a decay sets in.”
“Eigh?” said Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt, startlingly. “I didn’t hear you.”
“I was on the point of remarking,” shouted Aubrey Vair, wheeling the
array of his thoughts,—“I was on the point of remarking that few people
in Redhill could match Mrs. Morton’s fine broad green.”
“Others have noticed it,” Mrs. Bayne’s deaf aunt shouted back. “It is
since she has had in her new false teeth.”