THE CITY IN THE SEA
By H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
_Author of_
"THE BLUE LAGOON," "POOLS OF SILENCE,"
ETC.
Gaze deep-sea horses 'neath the wave
And dolphins in mosaic shown,
Up-glimmer from the courts they pave
Far down, what more?...
The winds, alone
Make answer with the gulls, across
The blue, blue depths of Hyalos.
_New York_
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1925
BY H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
THE CITY IN THE SEA
--Q--
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
[Illustration: The ISLAND OF HYALOS from a sketch map made on board the
_Lorna Doone_, giving soundings within and without the reefs.]
FOREWORD
In June of last year, 1925, long after this book was finished, the
_Morning Post_ published an account of how an Arab fisherman off the
Isle of Jerba had discovered a city under the sea, giving intimate
details that might have been taken from my little town Hyalos--details
vouched for by Count de Prohak and Sir Dennison Ross.
Five months later--November 1925--an American reader of "The City in
the Sea," then appearing serially in the States, sent me the following
cutting from a Hartford Paper:
"_Moscow, October 29._--Discovery of an ancient submerged city near
Shikov, a sandy bank on the Caspian Sea, was made Wednesday by
Alexis Atayeff, a captain in the Soviet mercantile fleet. Atayeff's
ship, bound from Persia to Baku, accidentally changed its usual
course, and while soundings were being made he noticed buildings
on the sea floor. Atayeff asserts that under the bright sunshine
he could distinguish streets and buildings of ancient Asiatic
architecture. Archæologists believe the discovery reveals the lost
city of Karadasheger, which is believed to have been submerged
centuries ago by an earthquake."
I make no complaint at these two old cities, one from the Caspian, the
other from the Mediterranean, presenting themselves like this to the
public; the desire for the limelight is excusable and understandable in
a way, but I think with some propriety they might have delayed their
appearance. As matters stand, many readers of the Press might fancy
they were first on the stage--this is not so. Hyalos was discovered by
me long before these venerable antiquities thought fit to appear at
the wings to be brought before the footlights by their producers, Sir
Dennison Ross and Captain Atayeff.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
I. A MODERN BUSINESS GIRL
II. A SMALL YACHTSMAN AND AN OLD DEALER
III. THE QUESTION
IV. THE REVELATION
V. HOW?
VI. MISS BEAMAN
VII. POOLE
VIII. THE PURCHASE OF THE "LORNA DOONE"
IX. MARTIA
X. DEEP SEA GEAR
XI. THE CREW OF BLIND MEN
XII. MARTIA'S SECRET
XIII. THE START
XIV. GENOA
XV. TOWARDS HYALOS
XVI. HYALOS
XVII. THE HOUSES
XVIII. A TERRIBLE DANGER
XIX. ONE OF THE DELIGHTFUL PEOPLE
XX. PLANS
XXI. THE SHIP
XXII. THE DUMPING OF THE VICTORY
XXIII. THE BOAT FROM ÆGINA
XXIV. A MAN OF WAR
XXV. GENOA AGAIN
XXVI. THE CUSTOMS
XXVII. THE GREAT ATTEMPT
XXVIII. WEST
XXIX. VISCONTI
XXX. CORNERED
XXXI. BEHRENS
XXXII. A GREAT ART DEALER
XXXIII. LONDON
XXXIV. THE END
The City in the Sea
CHAPTER I
A MODERN BUSINESS GIRL
One dry bright morning in early September, Robert Lestrange left his
rooms in Cadogan Street, and, boarding a bus bound for Charing Cross
climbed on to the roof.
Robert was good to look at, though as a matter of fact he was not
particularly good-looking, but he was young, well dressed, well groomed
and clean, innocent-seeming and light-hearted; a person one might fancy
most engaging to the eyes of girls and confidence trick men.
At Charing Cross he dropped off the bus and took his way along the
south side of the Strand, walking in a leisurely manner and absorbing
the details around him.
The Strand is much more than a street. It is the life of many nations,
the activities of many men; the past and present all made visible and
audible. In the Strand walk Henry Irving and Toole, no less surely
than Berry and Godfrey Tearle; Disraeli no less living than Baldwin.
It is an extension of the Bund of Nagasaki, and an earthquake in San
Francisco tells of itself here an hour after the event.
It has also some of the most delightful shops in the world. The shop,
for instance, where the sporting guns and rifles are arranged for view
and where the big game and the trees of the jungle show shadowlike
behind the express rifles.
Bobby hung before this window, absorbing its atmosphere of sport and
adventure; then he went on, crossing the mystic boundary line that
divides the West End from Newspaperland, on down Fleet Street and up
White Lion Court to the doorway of No. 1, Mortimer Buildings.
This is a bit of old London, and here, as in most bits of old London,
Romance sits in gloom and, frankly, dirt: the leases have not fallen
in, but the railings seem on the point of doing so, and the hall
doorsteps up which Bobby went, and the steps of the stairs leading to
the first floor, are hollowed out by the feet of generations.
The offices of Beaman & Hare are situated on the first floor facing
the court. The principal had not arrived, but Miss Hare was in and
would see Mr. Lestrange if he would wait. He agreed to this reasonable
proposition, took his seat in the tiny outer office, which was
furnished with the _Times_, two chairs, a table, and a portrait of
Thomas Hardy.
Bobby was a writing man. You never would have guessed it following him
down the Strand or now, as he sat nursing his knee, regardless of the
literature on the table and waiting to interview Miss Hare. When old
Nicholas Lestrange had gone broke over post-war industrials and died,
and when the Government had done taxing the estate, his one and only
child had found himself an orphan, possessed of the furniture of his
room at Bibliol College, Oxford, expensive tastes, and two hundred a
year to indulge them on.
He did not grumble. He dropped Oxford, came to London with some good
introductions, and plunged into the world of newspaperland.
When you start to learn how to be a chef you have to start to learn how
to wash up dishes. In Fleet Street it is the same. The great editor
is great partly because he has been through the mill and knows every
detail of his business; this Robert Lestrange found out after he had
been a month in the Street of Adventure, also the fact that he was
never likely to become a great editor. He had not the flair for news or
the instinct for news values, and the morning paper that is furiously
alive at breakfast time and dead at lunch seemed to him of all forms of
the printed word the most ephemeral.
Then he found, all at once and by accident, that he could write
stories, that he could invent news much more interesting than the news
in the papers, and doings much more intriguing (anyhow, more lasting in
interest) than the doings of the people of Shoreditch and Belgravia as
chronicled in the Press.
He sent his first short story to a friend who was a magazine editor,
and it was accepted. He sent a second, and it was refused. Challoner,
the editor, explained that the first one was a story and the second
was not, showed him the subtle difference between a tale and a record
of events; the fact that his first effort was instinctive and right,
and that in the second he had failed in a difficult theme for want of
craftsmanship; gave him a little book on the art, and dismissed him.
It was a defeat, and suffering under it he did something quite
distinctive. He burned his boats, dismissed his employers in Fleet
Street, and sat down to this new business, sending his productions to
no editor, but to Beaman & Hare, a literary agency recommended by a
friend.
This was his first visit to the office, with which he had been
corresponding for some months and with which he had already done fairly
satisfactory business.
The place did not impress him; it seemed small and cramped, and he was
still recovering from the stairs and the fact that Hare was a Miss. He
had always fancied the "M. Hare" who signed the typewritten letters and
also the cheques, a man; the text of the letters and the handwriting
had never suggested anything else. He wondered vaguely, as he sat
nursing his knee and waiting for his interview, whether the man who had
recommended him to this firm had been altogether happy in his advice.
He was not left long in doubt.
The office-boy returned, and he was shown down a passage into a room
where a girl seated before a desk littered with papers rose to receive
him. She was pleasingly dressed, her auburn hair was shingled, she wore
tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, she was nice-looking--not pretty,
nice-looking, in a new way.
And now, as she took off her reading glasses and they talked together,
she seemed to lose her sex; it was like talking to a man, only much
pleasanter.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," said the businesslike Miss
Hare, "but I am glad you have come. These are your papers and our
correspondence on the desk, and I kept you waiting whilst I got them
in order. That last story you sent us has been turned down by three
magazines because of the deficiency of feminine interest in it.
There's no woman at all in it, as a matter of fact, and that's not a
fault--it's a crime--in the eyes of the ordinary magazine editor. Yet
it is the best story you have written."
"I'm glad you think that," said Bobby.
"Yes, but I'm not an ordinary magazine editor," said Miss Hare. "It was
not the fault of the story that it was turned down, it was the fault
of our office. I have been away, and Miss Beaman has been busy and
Miss Strudwick, whom I am training, sent it to those magazines, quite
unsuitable for it. However, when I came back I sent it to the editor of
_Hoof and Horn_ with a strong personal note, and this morning I have
a letter from him. He likes it, and will pay ten pounds--a wretched
price. You see, the people who are interested in hoofs and horns are
not nearly so numerous as the people who are interested in girls."
Bobby assented. This frank confession and open way of doing business
came to him as a revelation pleasantly new.
"I'm afraid girls are not my strong point," said he.
"When a woman is reading a story," said Miss Hare, "she is the girl. If
there are six girls in the story, she is each one of them; if she is
eighty, she is still the heroine. If you make your girls pretty, and
not impossible, and make them go through adventures, your women readers
will supply all the rest. But there must be adventures, that is to say
love interest, for love is the only adventure that counts with women
readers. I know it's absurd, but there you are. I am not talking of
literature, but of story-writing for profit."
The gunshop in the Strand came before Bobby's eyes, and the visionary
jungle beasts that had called to him as a storyteller.
"Only half an hour ago," said he, "a shop-window in the Strand gave me
a lot of ideas--open air--half-formed ideas, but I felt as if I had
tumbled into a nest of stories--it wasn't a bonnet shop."
"What sort of shop?"
"A gunshop."
"I know it," said Miss Hare. "I've often looked in. At least, I think I
know the one you mean."
"Do you mean to say you are interested in guns?"
"Anything that takes one's mind away from London is interesting. I was
born in the country and could shoot before I was twelve, but that was
in the days before the war swept everything away."
A distant look came into her eyes, passed, and putting on the
tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, she turned to the table littered with
papers.
"Now here," said she, "is something that I want you to do. I would have
written about it had you not called. Do you know anything about Tanagra
statuettes?"
"I know the things you mean," said Bobby, "but I don't know much about
them."
"Well, the editor of the _Paternoster Magazine_ has a cover design for
the January number, and he wants a story written around it. Editors
sometimes want this sort of thing done. It's not high-class work, but
the _Paternoster_ is important and the story will be 'featured,' of
course, as representing the cover design. This is it."
She handed him a picture.
It represented a man's hand, open, and, standing on the palm, a Tanagra
figurine about nine inches high, a statuette of a Greek girl carrying a
jar on her shoulder.
Lestrange, holding the drawing a little distance away from him,
contemplated it with his head slightly on one side, and Miss Hare, in
her turn, contemplated him.
He pleased her.
Already, and before she had seen him, she had taken a liking to him.
She liked the stories he had sent in and she liked, even better, his
business letters addressed to the firm; modest, straightforward,
unassuming letters, always to the point: his handwriting had pleased
her, and she was a judge of handwriting.
"Of course," said she, "many writers would consider it perhaps _infra
dig_ to be asked for a story in this way written round a cover design,
but the _Paternoster_ is worth pleasing, and, after all, nobody will
know but the editor."
"Oh, I'm not bothering about that," said he. "It's the difficulty. How
on earth am I to make a story of this thing--that's the question."
"Johnson said he could write a story about a broomstick if called
upon," said Miss Hare.
"Yes, but this isn't a broomstick. I know something about broomsticks,
but this----Well, I'll try. I must hunt round and find out things about
Tanagra statuettes. The British Museum might help me, or the South
Kensington."
"Try Behrens, in Museum Street," said she. "He's sure to know, and he's
a dear old man, and you'll get atmosphere there, if you get nothing
else. Number Six A Museum Street is his address, and you can mention my
name. He's one of my best friends."
She paused, and into her eyes came that far-away look again, as though
she were gazing over the past.
"Shall I take the drawing with me?" asked he, rising to go.
"No," said the girl, "I'll send it to your address by registered post.
It's the only copy, and you might leave it in a cab or something. I'm
sure you are forgetful."
"Now, how on earth did she know that?" said Bobby as he came down the
stairs.