Part 3

And Mrs. Bunting it would seem briefly but clearly supplied an indication of the precise position of Mr. Chatteris, not omitting even that he was the nephew of an earl, as indeed why should she omit it?--and the splendid prospects of his alliance with Miss Glendower's plebeian but extensive wealth. The Sea Lady listened gravely. "He is young, he is able, he may still be anything--anything. And she is so earnest, so clever herself--always reading. She even reads Blue Books--government Blue Books I mean--dreadful statistical schedulely things. And the condition of the poor and all those things. She knows more about the condition of the poor than any one I've ever met; what they earn and what they eat, and how many of them live in a room. So dreadfully crowded, you know--perfectly shocking.... She is just the helper he needs. So dignified--so capable of giving political parties and influencing people, so earnest! And you know she can talk to workmen and 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 involved anecdote of Miss Glendower's marvellous blue-bookishness....

"He'll come here again soon?" the Sea Lady asked quite carelessly in the midst of it.

The query was carried away and lost in the anecdote, so that later the Sea 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 I don't think she troubled very much to see how her information was received.

What mind she had left over from her own discourse was probably centred on the tail.

V

Even to Mrs. Bunting's senses--she is one of those persons who take everything (except of course impertinence or impropriety) quite calmly--it must, I think, have been a little astonishing to find herself sitting in her boudoir, politely taking tea with a real live legendary creature. They were having tea in the boudoir, because of callers, and quite quietly because, in spite of the Sea Lady's smiling assurances, Mrs. Bunting would have it she _must_ be tired and unequal to the exertions 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 a general sort of way up and down the staircase (to the great annoyance of the servants who were thus kept out of it altogether) confirming one another's views of the tail, arguing on the theory of mermaids, revisiting the garden and beach and trying to invent an excuse for seeing the invalid again. They were forbidden to intrude and pledged to secrecy by Mrs. Bunting, and they must have been as altogether unsettled and miserable as young people can be. For a time they played croquet in a 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 all quite resolved to be pleasant to one another would talk. Mrs. Bunting and Miss Glendower were far too well trained in the observances of good society (which is as every one knows, even the best of it now, extremely mixed) to make too searching enquiries into the Sea Lady's status and way of life or precisely where she lived when she was at home, or whom she knew or didn't know. Though in their several ways they wanted to know badly enough. The Sea Lady volunteered no information, contenting herself with an entertaining superficiality of touch and go, in the most ladylike way. She professed herself greatly delighted with the sensation of being in air and superficially quite dry, and was particularly charmed 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. And Mrs. Bunting said: "I can hardly _imagine_ it without tea. It's worse than-- I mean it reminds me--of abroad."

Mrs. Bunting was in the act of refilling the Sea Lady's cup. "I suppose," she said suddenly, "as you're not used to it-- It won't affect your diges--" She glanced at Adeline and hesitated. "But it's China tea."

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 a whisper will attract attention that a turmoil fails to arouse, the tea had opened her eyes far more than the tail.

The Sea Lady looked at her with sudden frankness. "And think how wonderful all this must seem to _me_!" she remarked.

But Adeline's imagination was aroused for the moment and she was not to be put aside by the Sea Lady's terrestrial impressions. She pierced--for a moment or so--the ladylike serenity, the assumption of a terrestrial fashion of mind that was imposing so successfully upon Mrs. Bunting. "It must 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 the Niphetos roses on the table they talked of flowers and Miss Glendower ventured: "You have your anemones too! How beautiful they must be amidst the rocks!"

And the Sea Lady said they were very pretty--especially the cultivated sorts....

"And the fishes," said Mrs. Bunting. "How wonderful it must be to see the fishes!"

"Some of them," volunteered the Sea Lady, "will come and feed out of one's hand."

Mrs. Bunting made a little coo of approval. She was reminded of chrysanthemum shows and the outside of the Royal Academy exhibition and she was one of those people to whom only the familiar is really satisfying. She had a momentary vision of the abyss as a sort of diverticulum of Piccadilly and the Temple, a place unexpectedly rational and comfortable. There was a kink for a time about a little matter of illumination, but it recurred to Mrs. Bunting only long after. The Sea Lady had turned from Miss Glendower's interrogative gravity of expression to the sunlight.

"The sunlight seems so golden here," said the Sea Lady. "Is it always golden?"

"You have that beautiful greenery-blue shimmer I suppose," said Miss Glendower, "that one catches sometimes ever so faintly in aquaria----"

"One lives deeper than that," said the Sea Lady. "Everything is phosphorescent, you know, a mile or so down, and it's like--I hardly know. As towns look at night--only brighter. Like piers and things like that."

"Really!" said Mrs. Bunting, with the Strand after the theatres in her head. "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 that sort."

"Now that's very queer," said Mrs. Bunting with Miss Glendower's teacup in 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's Sunday?"

"We don't--" began the Sea Lady. "At least not exactly--" And then--"Of course one hears the beautiful hymns that are sung on the passenger ships."

"Of course!" said Mrs. Bunting, having sung so in her youth and quite forgetting something elusive that she had previously seemed to catch.

But afterwards there came a glimpse of some more serious divergence--a glimpse merely. Miss Glendower hazarded a supposition that the sea people also had their Problems, and then it would seem the natural earnestness of her disposition overcame her proper attitude of ladylike superficiality and she began to ask questions. There can be no doubt that the Sea Lady was evasive, and Miss Glendower, perceiving that she had been a trifle urgent, tried to cover her error by expressing a general impression.

"I can't see it," she said, with a gesture that asked for sympathy. "One wants to see it, one wants to _be_ it. One needs to be born a mer-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 wonder of the Immortals at that perpetual decay and death and replacement which is the gist of human life. Then at the expression of their faces she seemed to recollect. "Of course," she said, and then with a transition that 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 gown before today."

"What do you wear?" asked Miss Glendower. "Very charming things, I suppose."

"It's a different costume altogether," said the Sea Lady, brushing away a crumb.

Just for a moment Mrs. Bunting regarded her visitor fixedly. She had, I fancy, in that moment, an indistinct, imperfect glimpse of pagan possibilities. But there, you know, was the Sea Lady in her wrapper, so palpably a lady, with her pretty hair brought up to date and such a frank innocence in her eyes, that Mrs. Bunting's suspicions vanished as they came.

(But I am not so sure of Adeline.)

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE EPISODE OF THE VARIOUS JOURNALISTS

I

The remarkable thing is that the Buntings really carried out the programme Mrs. Bunting laid down. For a time at least they positively succeeded in converting the Sea Lady into a credible human invalid, in spite of the galaxy of witnesses to the lady's landing and in spite of the severe internal dissensions that presently broke out. In spite, moreover, of the fact that one of the maids--they found out which only long after--told the whole story under vows to her very superior young man who told it next Sunday to a rising journalist who was sitting about on the Leas maturing a descriptive article. The rising journalist was incredulous. But he went about enquiring. In the end he thought it good enough to go upon. He found in several quarters a vague but sufficient rumour of a something; for the maid's young man was a conversationalist when he had anything to say.

Finally the rising journalist went and sounded the people on the two chief Folkestone papers and found the thing had just got to them. They were inclined to pretend they hadn't heard of it, after the fashion of local papers when confronted by the abnormal, but the atmosphere of enterprise that surrounded the rising journalist woke them up. He perceived he had done so and that he had no time to lose. So while they engaged in inventing representatives to enquire, he went off and telephoned to the _Daily Gunfire_ and the _New Paper_. When they answered he was positive and earnest. He staked his reputation--the reputation of a rising journalist!

"I swear there's something up," he said. "Get in first--that's all."

He had some reputation, I say--and he had staked it. The _Daily Gunfire_ was sceptical but precise, and the _New Paper_ sprang a headline "A Mermaid at last!"

You might well have thought the thing was out after that, but it wasn't. There are things one doesn't believe even if they are printed in a halfpenny paper. To find the reporters hammering at their doors, so to speak, and fended off only for a time by a proposal that they should call again; to see their incredible secret glaringly in print, did indeed for a moment seem a hopeless exposure to both the Buntings and the Sea Lady. Already they could see the story spreading, could imagine the imminent rush of intimate enquiries, the tripod strides of a multitude of cameras, the crowds watching the windows, the horrors of a great publicity. All the Buntings and Mabel were aghast, simply aghast. Adeline was not so much aghast as excessively annoyed at this imminent and, so far as she was concerned, absolutely irrelevant publicity. "They will never dare--" she said, and "Consider how it affects Harry!" and at the earliest opportunity she retired to her own room. The others, with a certain disregard of her offence, sat around the Sea Lady's couch--she had scarcely touched her breakfast--and canvassed the coming terror.

"They will put our photographs in the papers," said the elder Miss Bunting.

"Well, they won't put mine in," said her sister. "It's horrid. I shall go right off now and have it taken again."

"They'll interview the Ded!"

"No, no," said Mr. Bunting terrified. "Your mother----"

"It's your place, my dear," said Mrs. Bunting.

"But the Ded--" said Fred.

"I couldn't," said Mr. Bunting.

"Well, some one'll have to tell 'em anyhow," said Mrs. Bunting. "You know, they will----"

"But it isn't at all what I wanted," wailed the Sea Lady, with the _Daily Gunfire_ in her hand. "Can't it be stopped?"

"You don't know our journalists," said Fred.

The tact of my cousin Melville saved the situation. He had dabbled in journalism and talked with literary fellows like myself. And literary fellows like myself are apt at times to be very free and outspoken about the press. He heard of the Buntings' shrinking terror of publicity as soon as he arrived, a perfect clamour--an almost exultant clamour indeed, of shrinking terror, and he caught the Sea Lady's eye and took his line there and then.

"It's not an occasion for sticking at trifles, Mrs. Bunting," he said. "But I think we can save the situation all the same. You're too hopeless. We must put our foot down at once; that's all. Let _me_ see these reporter fellows and write to the London dailies. I think I can take a line that will settle them."

"Eh?" said Fred.

"I can take a line that will stop it, trust me."

"What, altogether?"

"Altogether."

"How?" said Fred and Mrs. Bunting. "You're not going to bribe them!"

"Bribe!" said Mr. Bunting. "We're not in France. You can't bribe a British paper."

(A sort of subdued cheer went around from the assembled Buntings.)

"You leave it to me," said Melville, in his element.

And with earnestly expressed but not very confident wishes for his success, they did.

He managed the thing admirably.

"What's this about a mermaid?" he demanded of the local journalists when they returned. They travelled together for company, being, so to speak, emergency journalists, compositors in their milder moments, and unaccustomed to these higher aspects of journalism. "What's this about a mermaid?" repeated my cousin, while they waived precedence dumbly one to another.

"I believe some one's been letting you in," said my cousin Melville. "Just imagine!--a mermaid!"

"That's what we thought," said the younger of the two emergency journalists. "We knew it was some sort of hoax, you know. Only the _New Paper_ giving it a headline----"

"I'm amazed even Banghurst--" said my cousin Melville.

"It's in the _Daily Gunfire_ as well," said the older of the two emergency journalists.

"What's one more or less of these ha'penny fever rags?" cried my cousin with a ringing scorn. "Surely you're not going to take your Folkestone news from mere London papers."

"But how did the story come about?" began the older emergency journalist.

"That's not my affair."

The younger emergency journalist had an inspiration. He produced a note book from his breast pocket. "Perhaps, sir, you wouldn't mind suggesting to us something we might say----"

My cousin Melville complied.

II

The rising young journalist who had first got wind of the business--who must not for a moment be confused with the two emergency journalists heretofore described--came to Banghurst next night in a state of strange exultation. "I've been through with it and I've seen her," he panted. "I waited about outside and saw her taken into the carriage. I've talked to one of the maids--I got into the house under pretence of being a telephone man to see their telephone--I spotted the wire--and it's a fact. A positive fact--she's a mermaid with a tail--a proper mermaid's tail. I've got here----"

He displayed sheets.

"Whaddyer talking about?" said Banghurst from his littered desk, eyeing the sheets with apprehensive animosity.

"The mermaid--there really _is_ a mermaid. At Folkestone."

Banghurst turned away from him and pawed at his pen tray. "Whad if there is!" he said after a pause.

"But it's proved. That note you printed----"

"That note I printed was a mistake if there's anything of that sort going, young man." Banghurst remained an obstinate expansion of back.

"How?"

"We don't deal in mermaids here."

"But you're not going to let it drop?"

"I am."

"But there she is!"

"Let her be." He turned on the rising young journalist, and his massive face was unusually massive and his voice fine and full and fruity. "Do you think we're going to make our public believe anything simply because it's true? They know perfectly well what they are going to believe and what they aren't going to believe, and they aren't going to believe anything about mermaids--you bet your hat. I don't care if the whole damned beach was littered with mermaids--not the whole damned beach! We've got our reputation to keep up. See?... Look here!--you don't learn journalism as I hoped you'd do. It was you what brought in all that stuff about a discovery in chemistry----"

"It's true."

"Ugh!"

"I had it from a Fellow of the Royal Society----"

"I don't care if you had it from--anybody. Stuff that the public won't believe aren't facts. Being true only makes 'em worse. They buy our paper to swallow it and it's got to go down easy. When I printed you that note and headline I thought you was up to a lark. I thought you was on to a mixed bathing scandal or something of that sort--with juice in it. The sort of thing that _all_ understand. You know when you went down to Folkestone you were going to describe what Salisbury and all the rest of them wear upon the Leas. And start a discussion on the acclimatisation of the cafe. And all that. And then you get on to this (unprintable epithet) nonsense!"

"But Lord Salisbury--he doesn't go to Folkestone."

Banghurst shrugged his shoulders over a hopeless case. "What the deuce," he said, addressing his inkpot in plaintive tones, "does _that_ matter?"

The young man reflected. He addressed Banghurst's back after a pause. His voice had flattened a little. "I might go over this and do it up as a lark perhaps. Make it a comic dialogue sketch with a man who really believed in it--or something like that. It's a beastly lot of copy to get slumped, you know."

"Nohow," said Banghurst. "Not in any shape. No! Why! They'd think it clever. They'd think you was making game of them. They hate things they think are clever!"

The young man made as if to reply, but Banghurst's back expressed quite clearly that the interview was at an end.

"Nohow," repeated Banghurst just when it seemed he had finished altogether.

"I may take it to the _Gunfire_ then?"

Banghurst suggested an alternative.

"Very well," said the young man, heated, "the _Gunfire_ it is."

But in that he was reckoning without the editor of the _Gunfire_.

III

It must have been quite soon after that, that I myself heard the first mention of the mermaid, little recking that at last it would fall to me to write her history. I was on one of my rare visits to London, and Micklethwaite was giving me lunch at the Penwiper Club, certainly one of the best dozen literary clubs in London. I noted the rising young journalist at a table near the door, lunching alone. All about him tables were vacant, though the other parts of the room were crowded. He sat with his face towards the door, and he kept looking up whenever any one came in, as if he expected some one who never came. Once distinctly I saw him beckon to a man, but the man did not respond.

"Look here, Micklethwaite," I said, "why is everybody avoiding that man over there? I noticed just now in the smoking-room that he seemed to be trying to get into conversation with some one and that a kind of taboo----"

Micklethwaite stared over his fork. "Ra-ther," he said.

"But what's he done?"

"He's a fool," said Micklethwaite with his mouth full, evidently annoyed. "Ugh," he said as soon as he was free to do so.

I waited a little while.

"What's he done?" I ventured.

Micklethwaite did not answer for a moment and crammed things into his mouth vindictively, bread and all sorts of things. Then leaning towards me in a confidential manner he made indignant noises which I could not clearly distinguish as words.

"Oh!" I said, when he had done.

"Yes," said Micklethwaite. He swallowed and then poured himself wine--splashing the tablecloth.

"He had _me_ for an hour very nearly the other day."

"Yes?" I said.

"Silly fool," said Micklethwaite.

I was afraid it was all over, but luckily he gave me an opening again after gulping down his wine.

"He leads you on to argue," he said.

"That----?"

"That he can't prove it."

"Yes?"

"And then he shows you he can. Just showing off how damned ingenious he is."

I was a little confused. "Prove what?" I asked.

"Haven't I been telling you?" said Micklethwaite, growing very red. "About this confounded mermaid of his at Folkestone."

"He says there is one?"

"Yes, he does," said Micklethwaite, going purple and staring at me very hard. He seemed to ask mutely whether I of all people proposed to turn on him and back up this infamous scoundrel. I thought for a moment he would have apoplexy, but happily he remembered his duty as my host. So he turned very suddenly on a meditative waiter for not removing our plates.

"Had any golf lately?" I said to Micklethwaite, when the plates and the remains of the waiter had gone away. Golf always does Micklethwaite good except when he is actually playing. Then, I am told-- If I were Mrs. Bunting I should break off and raise my eyebrows and both hands at this point, to indicate how golf acts on Micklethwaite when he is playing.

I turned my mind to feigning an interest in golf--a game that in truth I despise and hate as I despise and hate nothing else in this world. Imagine a great fat creature like Micklethwaite, a creature who ought to wear a turban and a long black robe to hide his grossness, whacking a little white ball for miles and miles with a perfect surgery of instruments, whacking it either with a babyish solemnity or a childish rage as luck may have decided, whacking away while his country goes to the devil, and incidentally training an innocent-eyed little boy to swear and be a tip-hunting loafer. That's golf! However, I controlled my all too facile sneer and talked of golf and the relative merits of golf links as I might talk to a child about buns or distract a puppy with the whisper of "rats," and when at last I could look at the rising young journalist again our lunch had come to an end.

I saw that he was talking with a greater air of freedom than it is usual to display to club waiters, to the man who held his coat. The man looked incredulous but respectful, and was answering shortly but politely.

When we went out this little conversation was still going on. The waiter was holding the rising young journalist's soft felt hat and the rising young journalist was fumbling in his coat pocket with a thick mass of papers.

"It's tremendous. I've got most of it here," he was saying as we went by. "I don't know if you'd care----"

"I get very little time for reading, sir," the waiter was replying.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE QUALITY OF PARKER

I