CHAPTER THE SECOND
SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I
There with as much verisimilitude as I can give it, is how theFolkestone mermaid really came to land. There can be no doubt that thewhole affair was a deliberately planned intrusion upon her part. Shenever had cramp, she couldn't have cramp, and as for drowning, nobodywas near drowning for a moment except Mr. Bunting, whose valuable lifeshe very nearly sacrificed at the outset of her adventure. And her nextproceeding was to demand an interview with Mrs. Bunting and to presumeupon her youthful and glowing appearance to gain the support, sympathyand assistance of that good-hearted lady (who as a matter of fact was athing of yesterday, a mere chicken in comparison with her own immemorialyears) in her extraordinary raid upon Humanity.
Her treatment of Mrs. Bunting would be incredible if we did not knowthat, in spite of many disadvantages, the Sea Lady was an extremely wellread person. She admitted as much in several later conversations with mycousin Melville. For a time there was a friendly intimacy--so Melvillealways preferred to present it--between these two, and my cousin, whohas a fairly considerable amount of curiosity, learnt many veryinteresting details about the life "out there" or "down there"--for theSea Lady used either expression. At first the Sea Lady was exceedinglyreticent under the gentle insistence of his curiosity, but after a time,I gather, she gave way to bursts of cheerful confidence. "It is clear,"says my cousin, "that the old ideas of the submarine life as a sort ofperpetual game of 'who-hoop' through groves of coral, diversified bymoonlight hair-combings on rocky strands, need very extensivemodification." In this matter of literature, for example, they havepractically all that we have, and unlimited leisure to read it in.Melville is very insistent upon and rather envious of that unlimitedleisure. A picture of a mermaid swinging in a hammock of woven seaweed,with what bishops call a "latter-day" novel in one hand and a sixteencandle-power phosphorescent fish in the other, may jar upon one'spreconceptions, but it is certainly far more in accordance with thepicture of the abyss she printed on his mind. Everywhere Change worksher will on things. Everywhere, and even among the immortals, Modernityspreads. Even on Olympus I suppose there is a Progressive party and anew Phaeton agitating to supersede the horses of his father by somesolar motor of his own. I suggested as much to Melville and he said"Horrible! Horrible!" and stared hard at my study fire. Dear oldMelville! She gave him no end of facts about Deep Sea Reading.
Of course they do not print books "out there," for the printer's inkunder water would not so much run as fly--she made that very plain; butin one way or another nearly the whole of terrestrial literature, saysMelville, has come to them. "We know," she said. They form indeed adistinct reading public, and additions to their vast submerged librarythat circulates forever with the tides, are now pretty systematicallysought. The sources are various and in some cases a little odd. Manybooks have been found in sunken ships. "Indeed!" said Melville. There isalways a dropping and blowing overboard of novels and magazines frommost passenger-carrying vessels--sometimes, but these are not as a rulevaluable additions--a deliberate shying overboard. But sometimes booksof an exceptional sort are thrown over when they are quite finished.(Melville is a dainty irritable reader and no doubt he understood that.)From the sea beaches of holiday resorts, moreover, the lighter sorts ofliterature are occasionally getting blown out to sea. And so soon as theBooms of our great Popular Novelists are over, Melville assured me, thelibraries find it convenient to cast such surplus copies of theircurrent works as the hospitals and prisons cannot take, below high-watermark.
"That's not generally known," said I.
"_They_ know it," said Melville.
In other ways the beaches yield. Young couples who "begin to sitheapy," the Sea Lady told my cousin, as often as not will leaveexcellent modern fiction behind them, when at last they return to theirproper place. There is a particularly fine collection of English work,it seems, in the deep water of the English Channel; practically thewhole of the Tauchnitz Library is there, thrown overboard at the lastmoment by conscientious or timid travellers returning from thecontinent, and there was for a time a similar source of supply ofAmerican reprints in the Mersey, but that has fallen off in recentyears. And the Deep Sea Mission for Fishermen has now for some yearsbeen raining down tracts and giving a particularly elevated tone ofthought to the extensive shallows of the North Sea. The Sea Lady wasvery precise on these points.
When one considers the conditions of its accumulation, one is notsurprised to hear that the element of fiction is as dominant in thisDeep Sea Library as it is upon the counters of Messrs. Mudie; but mycousin learnt that the various illustrated magazines, and particularlythe fashion papers, are valued even more highly than novels, are lookedfor far more eagerly and perused with envious emotion. Indeed on thatpoint my cousin got a sudden glimpse of one of the motives that hadbrought this daring young lady into the air. He made some sort ofsuggestion. "We should have taken to dressing long ago," she said, andadded, with a vague quality of laughter in her tone, "it isn't thatwe're unfeminine, Mr. Melville. Only--as I was explaining to Mrs.Bunting, one must consider one's circumstances--how _can_ one _hope_ tokeep anything nice under water? Imagine lace!"
"Soaked!" said my cousin Melville.
"Drenched!" said the Sea Lady.
"Ruined!" said my cousin Melville.
"And then you know," said the Sea Lady very gravely, "one's hair!"
"Of course," said Melville. "Why!--you can never get it _dry_!"
"That's precisely it," said she.
My cousin Melville had a new light on an old topic. "And that's why--inthe old time----?"
"Exactly!" she cried, "exactly! Before there were so many Excursionistsand sailors and Low People about, one came out, one sat and brushed itin the sun. And then of course it really _was_ possible to do it up. Butnow----"
She made a petulant gesture and looked gravely at Melville, biting herlip the while. My cousin made a sympathetic noise. "The horrid modernspirit," he said--almost automatically....
But though fiction and fashion appear to be so regrettably dominant inthe nourishment of the mer-mind, it must not be supposed that the mostserious side of our reading never reaches the bottom of the sea. Therewas, for example, a case quite recently, the Sea Lady said, of thecaptain of a sailing ship whose mind had become unhinged by thehuckstering uproar of the _Times_ and _Daily Mail_, and who had not onlybought a second-hand copy of the _Times_ reprint of the EncyclopaediaBritannica, but also that dense collection of literary snacks andsamples, that All-Literature Sausage which has been compressed under theweighty editing of Doctor Richard Garnett. It has long been notoriousthat even the greatest minds of the past were far too copious andconfusing in their--as the word goes--lubrications. Doctor Garnett, itis alleged, has seized the gist and presented it so compactly thatalmost any business man now may take hold of it without hindrance to hismore serious occupations. The unfortunate and misguided seaman seems tohave carried the entire collection aboard with him, with the prettyevident intention of coming to land in Sydney the wisest man alive--aHindoo-minded thing to do. The result might have been anticipated. Themass shifted in the night, threw the whole weight of the science of themiddle nineteenth century and the literature of all time, in avirulently concentrated state, on one side of his little vessel andcapsized it instantly....
The ship, the Sea Lady said, dropped into the abyss as if it were loadedwith lead, and its crew and other movables did not follow it down untilmuch later in the day. The captain was the first to arrive, said the SeaLady, and it is a curious fact, due probably to some preliminarydippings into his purchase, that he came head first, instead of feetdown and limbs expanded in the customary way....
However, such exceptional windfalls avail little against the rain oflight literature that is constantly going on. The novel and thenewspaper remain the world's reading even at the bottom of the sea. Assubsequent events would seem to show, it must have been from the commonlatter-day novel and the newspaper that th
e Sea Lady derived her ideasof human life and sentiment and the inspiration of her visit. And if attimes she seemed to underestimate the nobler tendencies of the humanspirit, if at times she seemed disposed to treat Adeline Glendower andmany of the deeper things of life with a certain sceptical levity, ifshe did at last indisputably subordinate reason and right feeling topassion, it is only just to her, and to those deeper issues, that weshould ascribe her aberrations to their proper cause....
II
My cousin Melville, I was saying, did at one time or another get avague, a very vague conception of what that deep-sea world was like. Butwhether his conception has any quality of truth in it is more than Idare say. He gives me an impression of a very strange world indeed, agreen luminous fluidity in which these beings float, a world lit bygreat shining monsters that drift athwart it, and by waving forests ofnebulous luminosity amidst which the little fishes drift like nettedstars. It is a world with neither sitting, nor standing, nor going, norcoming, through which its inhabitants float and drift as one floats anddrifts in dreams. And the way they live there! "My dear man!" saidMelville, "it must be like a painted ceiling!..."
I do not even feel certain that it is in the sea particularly that thisworld of the Sea Lady is to be found. But about those saturated booksand drowned scraps of paper, you say? Things are not always what theyseem, and she told him all of that, we must reflect, one laughingafternoon.
She could appear, at times, he says, as real as you or I, and again camemystery all about her. There were times when it seemed to him you mighthave hurt her or killed her as you can hurt and kill anyone--with apenknife for example--and there were times when it seemed to him youcould have destroyed the whole material universe and left her smilingstill. But of this ambiguous element in the lady, more is to be toldlater. There are wider seas than ever keel sailed upon, and deeps thatno lead of human casting will ever plumb. When it is all summed up, Ihave to admit, I do not know, I cannot tell. I fall back upon Melvilleand my poor array of collected facts. At first there was amazinglylittle strangeness about her for any who had to deal with her. There shewas, palpably solid and material, a lady out of the sea.
This modern world is a world where the wonderful is utterly commonplace.We are bred to show a quiet freedom from amazement, and why should weboggle at material Mermaids, with Dewars solidifying all sorts ofimpalpable things and Marconi waves spreading everywhere? To theBuntings she was as matter of fact, as much a matter of authentic andreasonable motives and of sound solid sentimentality, as everything elsein the Bunting world. So she was for them in the beginning, and so up tothis day with them her memory remains.
III
The way in which the Sea Lady talked to Mrs. Bunting on that memorablemorning, when she lay all wet and still visibly fishy on the couch inMrs. Bunting's dressing-room, I am also able to give with some littlefulness, because Mrs. Bunting repeated it all several times, acting themore dramatic speeches in it, to my cousin Melville in several of thosegood long talks that both of them in those happy days--and particularlyMrs. Bunting--always enjoyed so much. And with her very first speech, itseems, the Sea Lady took her line straight to Mrs. Bunting's generousmanaging heart. She sat up on the couch, drew the antimacassar modestlyover her deformity, and sometimes looking sweetly down and sometimesopenly and trustfully into Mrs. Bunting's face, and speaking in a softclear grammatical manner that stamped her at once as no mere mermaidbut a finished fine Sea Lady, she "made a clean breast of it," as Mrs.Bunting said, and "fully and frankly" placed herself in Mrs. Bunting'shands.
"Mrs. Bunting," said Mrs. Bunting to my cousin Melville, in a dramaticrendering of the Sea Lady's manner, "do permit me to apologise for thisintrusion, for I know it _is_ an intrusion. But indeed it has almostbeen _forced_ upon me, and if you will only listen to my story, Mrs.Bunting, I think you will find--well, if not a complete excuse forme--for I can understand how exacting your standards must be--at anyrate _some_ excuse for what I have done--for what I _must_ call, Mrs.Bunting, my deceitful conduct towards you. Deceitful it was, Mrs.Bunting, for I never had cramp-- But then, Mrs. Bunting"--and here Mrs.Bunting would insert a long impressive pause--"I never had a mother!"
"And then and there," said Mrs. Bunting, when she told the story to mycousin Melville, "the poor child burst into tears and confessed she hadbeen born ages and ages ago in some dreadful miraculous way in someterrible place near Cyprus, and had no more right to a surname-- Well,_there_--!" said Mrs. Bunting, telling the story to my cousin Melvilleand making the characteristic gesture with which she always passed overand disowned any indelicacy to which her thoughts might have tended."And all the while speaking with such a nice accent and moving in such aladylike way!"
"Of course," said my cousin Melville, "there are classes of people inwhom one excuses-- One must weigh----"
"Precisely," said Mrs. Bunting. "And you see it seems she deliberatelychose _me_ as the very sort of person she had always wanted to appealto. It wasn't as if she came to us haphazard--she picked us out. She hadbeen swimming round the coast watching people day after day, she said,for quite a long time, and she said when she saw my face, watching thegirls bathe--you know how funny girls are," said Mrs. Bunting, with alittle deprecatory laugh, and all the while with a moisture of emotionin her kindly eyes. "She took quite a violent fancy to me from the veryfirst."
"I can _quite_ believe _that_, at any rate," said my cousin Melvillewith unction. I know he did, although he always leaves it out of thestory when he tells it to me. But then he forgets that I have had theoccasional privilege of making a third party in these good long talks.
"You know it's most extraordinary and exactly like the German story,"said Mrs. Bunting. "Oom--what is it?"
"Undine?"
"Exactly--yes. And it really seems these poor creatures are Immortal,Mr. Melville--at least within limits--creatures born of the elements andresolved into the elements again--and just as it is in the story--there'salways a something--they have no Souls! No Souls at all! Nothing! Andthe poor child feels it. She feels it dreadfully. But in order to _get_souls, Mr. Melville, you know they have to come into the world of men.At least so they believe down there. And so she has come to Folkestone.To get a soul. Of course that's her great object, Mr. Melville, butshe's not at all fanatical or silly about it. Any more than _we_ are. Ofcourse _we_--people who feel deeply----"
"Of course," said my cousin Melville, with, I know, a momentaryexpression of profound gravity, drooping eyelids and a hushed voice. Formy cousin does a good deal with his soul, one way and another.
"And she feels that if she comes to earth at all," said Mrs. Bunting,"she _must_ come among _nice_ people and in a nice way. One canunderstand her feeling like that. But imagine her difficulties! To be amere cause of public excitement, and silly paragraphs in the sillyseason, to be made a sort of show of, in fact--she doesn't want _any_ ofit," added Mrs. Bunting, with the emphasis of both hands.
"What _does_ she want?" asked my cousin Melville.
"She wants to be treated exactly like a human being, to _be_ a humanbeing, just like you or me. And she asks to stay with us, to be one ofour family, and to learn how we live. She has asked me to advise herwhat books to read that are really nice, and where she can get adress-maker, and how she can find a clergyman to sit under who wouldreally be likely to understand her case, and everything. She wants me toadvise her about it all. She wants to put herself altogether in myhands. And she asked it all so nicely and sweetly. She wants me toadvise her about it all."
"Um," said my cousin Melville.
"You should have heard her!" cried Mrs. Bunting.
"Practically it's another daughter," he reflected.
"Yes," said Mrs. Bunting, "and even that did not frighten me. Sheadmitted as much."
"Still----"
He took a step.
"She has means?" he inquired abruptly.
"Ample. She told me there was a box. She said it was moored at the endof a groin, and accordingly dear Randolph watched all throu
gh luncheon,and afterwards, when they could wade out and reach the end of the ropethat tied it, he and Fred pulled it in and helped Fitch and thecoachman carry it up. It's a curious little box for a lady to have,well made, of course, but of wood, with a ship painted on the top andthe name of 'Tom' cut in it roughly with a knife; but, as she says,leather simply will _not_ last down there, and one has to put up withwhat one can get; and the great thing is it's _full_, perfectly full,of gold coins and things. Yes, gold--and diamonds, Mr. Melville. Youknow Randolph understands something-- Yes, well he says that box--oh!I couldn't tell you _how_ much it isn't worth! And all the gold thingswith just a sort of faint reddy touch.... But anyhow, she is rich, aswell as charming and beautiful. And really you know, Mr. Melville,altogether-- Well, I'm going to help her, just as much as ever I can.Practically, she's to be our paying guest. As you know--it's no greatsecret between _us_--Adeline-- Yes.... She'll be the same. And I shallbring her out and introduce her to people and so forth. It will be agreat help. And for everyone except just a few intimate friends, she isto be just a human being who happens to be an invalid--temporarily aninvalid--and we are going to engage a good, trustworthy woman--the sortof woman who isn't astonished at anything, you know--they're a littleexpensive but they're to be got even nowadays--who will be hermaid--and make her dresses, her skirts at any rate--and we shall dressher in long skirts--and throw something over It, you know----"
"Over----?"
"The tail, you know."
My cousin Melville said "Precisely!" with his head and eyebrows. Butthat was the point that hadn't been clear to him so far, and it took hisbreath away. Positively--a tail! All sorts of incorrect theories went bythe board. Somehow he felt this was a topic not to be too urgentlypursued. But he and Mrs. Bunting were old friends.
"And she really has ... a tail?" he asked.
"Like the tail of a big mackerel," said Mrs. Bunting, and he asked nomore.
"It's a most extraordinary situation," he said.
"But what else _could_ I do?" asked Mrs. Bunting.
"Of course the thing's a tremendous experiment," said my cousinMelville, and repeated quite inadvertently, "_a tail!_"
Clear and vivid before his eyes, obstructing absolutely the advance ofhis thoughts, were the shiny clear lines, the oily black, the green andpurple and silver, and the easy expansiveness of a mackerel'stermination.
"But really, you know," said my cousin Melville, protesting in the nameof reason and the nineteenth century--"a tail!"
"I patted it," said Mrs. Bunting.
IV
Certain supplementary aspects of the Sea Lady's first conversation withMrs. Bunting I got from that lady herself afterwards.
The Sea Lady had made one queer mistake. "Your four charming daughters,"she said, "and your two sons."
"My dear!" cried Mrs. Bunting--they had got through their preliminariesby then--"I've only two daughters and one son!"
"The young man who carried--who rescued me?"
"Yes. And the other two girls are friends, you know, visitors who arestaying with me. On land one has visitors----"
"I know. So I made a mistake?"
"Oh yes."
"And the other young man?"
"You don't mean Mr. Bunting."
"Who is Mr. Bunting?"
"The other gentleman who----"
"_No!_"
"There was no one----"
"But several mornings ago?"
"Could it have been Mr. Melville?... _I_ know! You mean Mr. Chatteris! Iremember, he came down with us one morning. A tall young man withfair--rather curlyish you might say--hair, wasn't it? And a ratherthoughtful face. He was dressed all in white linen and he sat on thebeach."
"I fancy he did," said the Sea Lady.
"He's not my son. He's--he's a friend. He's engaged to Adeline, to theelder Miss Glendower. He was stopping here for a night or so. I daresayhe'll come again on his way back from Paris. Dear me! Fancy _my_ havinga son like that!"
The Sea Lady was not quite prompt in replying.
"What a stupid mistake for me to make!" she said slowly; and then withmore animation, "Of course, now I think, he's much too old to be yourson!"
"Well, he's thirty-two!" said Mrs. Bunting with a smile.
"It's preposterous."
"I won't say _that_."
"But I saw him only at a distance, you know," said the Sea Lady; andthen, "And so he is engaged to Miss Glendower? And Miss Glendower----?"
"Is the young lady in the purple robe who----"
"Who carried a book?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Bunting, "that's the one. They've been engaged threemonths."
"Dear me!" said the Sea Lady. "She seemed-- And is he very much in lovewith her?"
"Of course," said Mrs. Bunting.
"_Very_ much?"
"Oh--of _course_. If he wasn't, he wouldn't----"
"Of course," said the Sea Lady thoughtfully.
"And it's such an excellent match in every way. Adeline's just in thevery position to help him----"
And Mrs. Bunting it would seem briefly but clearly supplied anindication of the precise position of Mr. Chatteris, not omitting eventhat he was the nephew of an earl, as indeed why should she omitit?--and the splendid prospects of his alliance with Miss Glendower'splebeian but extensive wealth. The Sea Lady listened gravely. "He isyoung, he is able, he may still be anything--anything. And she is soearnest, so clever herself--always reading. She even reads BlueBooks--government Blue Books I mean--dreadful statistical schedulelythings. And the condition of the poor and all those things. She knowsmore about the condition of the poor than any one I've ever met; whatthey earn and what they eat, and how many of them live in a room. Sodreadfully crowded, you know--perfectly shocking.... She is just thehelper he needs. So dignified--so capable of giving political partiesand influencing people, so earnest! And you know she can talk to workmenand take an interest in trades unions, and in quite astonishing things._I_ always think she's just _Marcella_ come to life."
And from that the good lady embarked upon an illustrative but involvedanecdote of Miss Glendower's marvellous blue-bookishness....
"He'll come here again soon?" the Sea Lady asked quite carelessly in themidst of it.
The query was carried away and lost in the anecdote, so that later theSea Lady repeated her question even more carelessly.
But Mrs. Bunting did not know whether the Sea Lady sighed at all or not.She thinks not. She was so busy telling her all about everything that Idon't think she troubled very much to see how her information wasreceived.
What mind she had left over from her own discourse was probably centredon the tail.
V
Even to Mrs. Bunting's senses--she is one of those persons who takeeverything (except of course impertinence or impropriety) quitecalmly--it must, I think, have been a little astonishing to find herselfsitting in her boudoir, politely taking tea with a real live legendarycreature. They were having tea in the boudoir, because of callers, andquite quietly because, in spite of the Sea Lady's smiling assurances,Mrs. Bunting would have it she _must_ be tired and unequal to theexertions of social intercourse. "After _such_ a journey," said Mrs.Bunting. There were just the three, Adeline Glendower being the third;and Fred and the three other girls, I understand, hung about in ageneral sort of way up and down the staircase (to the great annoyance ofthe servants who were thus kept out of it altogether) confirming oneanother's views of the tail, arguing on the theory of mermaids,revisiting the garden and beach and trying to invent an excuse forseeing the invalid again. They were forbidden to intrude and pledged tosecrecy by Mrs. Bunting, and they must have been as altogether unsettledand miserable as young people can be. For a time they played croquet ina half-hearted way, each no doubt with an eye on the boudoir window.
(And as for Mr. Bunting, he was in bed.)
I gather that the three ladies sat and talked as any three ladies allquite resolved to be pleasant to one another would talk. Mrs. Buntingand Miss Glendower were far too well
trained in the observances of goodsociety (which is as every one knows, even the best of it now, extremelymixed) to make too searching enquiries into the Sea Lady's status andway of life or precisely where she lived when she was at home, or whomshe knew or didn't know. Though in their several ways they wanted toknow badly enough. The Sea Lady volunteered no information, contentingherself with an entertaining superficiality of touch and go, in the mostladylike way. She professed herself greatly delighted with the sensationof being in air and superficially quite dry, and was particularlycharmed with tea.
"And don't you have _tea_?" cried Miss Glendower, startled.
"How can we?"
"But do you really mean----?"
"I've never tasted tea before. How do you think we can boil a kettle?"
"What a strange--what a wonderful world it must be!" cried Adeline. AndMrs. Bunting said: "I can hardly _imagine_ it without tea. It's worsethan-- I mean it reminds me--of abroad."
Mrs. Bunting was in the act of refilling the Sea Lady's cup. "Isuppose," she said suddenly, "as you're not used to it-- It won't affectyour diges--" She glanced at Adeline and hesitated. "But it's Chinatea."
And she filled the cup.
"It's an inconceivable world to me," said Adeline. "Quite."
Her dark eyes rested thoughtfully on the Sea Lady for a space."Inconceivable," she repeated, for, in that unaccountable way in which awhisper will attract attention that a turmoil fails to arouse, the teahad opened her eyes far more than the tail.
The Sea Lady looked at her with sudden frankness. "And think howwonderful all this must seem to _me_!" she remarked.
But Adeline's imagination was aroused for the moment and she was not tobe put aside by the Sea Lady's terrestrial impressions. She pierced--fora moment or so--the ladylike serenity, the assumption of a terrestrialfashion of mind that was imposing so successfully upon Mrs. Bunting. "Itmust be," she said, "the strangest world." And she stopped invitingly....
She could not go beyond that and the Sea Lady would not help her.
There was a pause, a silent eager search for topics. Apropos of theNiphetos roses on the table they talked of flowers and Miss Glendowerventured: "You have your anemones too! How beautiful they must be amidstthe rocks!"
And the Sea Lady said they were very pretty--especially the cultivatedsorts....
"And the fishes," said Mrs. Bunting. "How wonderful it must be to seethe fishes!"
"Some of them," volunteered the Sea Lady, "will come and feed out ofone's hand."
Mrs. Bunting made a little coo of approval. She was reminded ofchrysanthemum shows and the outside of the Royal Academy exhibition andshe was one of those people to whom only the familiar is reallysatisfying. She had a momentary vision of the abyss as a sort ofdiverticulum of Piccadilly and the Temple, a place unexpectedly rationaland comfortable. There was a kink for a time about a little matter ofillumination, but it recurred to Mrs. Bunting only long after. The SeaLady had turned from Miss Glendower's interrogative gravity ofexpression to the sunlight.
"The sunlight seems so golden here," said the Sea Lady. "Is it alwaysgolden?"
"You have that beautiful greenery-blue shimmer I suppose," said MissGlendower, "that one catches sometimes ever so faintly in aquaria----"
"One lives deeper than that," said the Sea Lady. "Everything isphosphorescent, you know, a mile or so down, and it's like--I hardlyknow. As towns look at night--only brighter. Like piers and things likethat."
"Really!" said Mrs. Bunting, with the Strand after the theatres in herhead. "Quite bright?"
"Oh, quite," said the Sea Lady.
"But--" struggled Adeline, "is it never put out?"
"It's so different," said the Sea Lady.
"That's why it is so interesting," said Adeline.
"There are no nights and days, you know. No time nor anything of thatsort."
"Now that's very queer," said Mrs. Bunting with Miss Glendower's teacupin her hand--they were both drinking quite a lot of tea absent-mindedly,in their interest in the Sea Lady. "But how do you tell when it'sSunday?"
"We don't--" began the Sea Lady. "At least not exactly--" And then--"Ofcourse one hears the beautiful hymns that are sung on the passengerships."
"Of course!" said Mrs. Bunting, having sung so in her youth and quiteforgetting something elusive that she had previously seemed to catch.
But afterwards there came a glimpse of some more serious divergence--aglimpse merely. Miss Glendower hazarded a supposition that the seapeople also had their Problems, and then it would seem the naturalearnestness of her disposition overcame her proper attitude of ladylikesuperficiality and she began to ask questions. There can be no doubtthat the Sea Lady was evasive, and Miss Glendower, perceiving that shehad been a trifle urgent, tried to cover her error by expressing ageneral impression.
"I can't see it," she said, with a gesture that asked for sympathy. "Onewants to see it, one wants to _be_ it. One needs to be born amer-child."
"A mer-child?" asked the Sea Lady.
"Yes-- Don't you call your little ones----?"
"_What_ little ones?" asked the Sea Lady.
She regarded them for a moment with a frank wonder, the undying wonderof the Immortals at that perpetual decay and death and replacement whichis the gist of human life. Then at the expression of their faces sheseemed to recollect. "Of course," she said, and then with a transitionthat made pursuit difficult, she agreed with Adeline. "It _is_different," she said. "It _is_ wonderful. One feels so alike, you know,and so different. That's just where it _is_ so wonderful. Do I look--?And yet you know I have never had my hair up, nor worn a dressing gownbefore today."
"What do you wear?" asked Miss Glendower. "Very charming things, Isuppose."
"It's a different costume altogether," said the Sea Lady, brushing awaya crumb.
Just for a moment Mrs. Bunting regarded her visitor fixedly. She had, Ifancy, in that moment, an indistinct, imperfect glimpse of paganpossibilities. But there, you know, was the Sea Lady in her wrapper, sopalpably a lady, with her pretty hair brought up to date and such afrank innocence in her eyes, that Mrs. Bunting's suspicions vanished asthey came.
(But I am not so sure of Adeline.)