Part 7

"Is it mine?"

"Isn't it a little late in the day to drop it?" said Melville. "You've been put up for it now. Every one's at work. Miss Glendower----"

"I know," said Chatteris.

"Well?"

"I don't seem to want to go on."

"My dear man!"

"It's a bit of overwork perhaps. I'm off colour. Things have gone flat. That's why I'm up here."

He did a very absurd thing. He threw away a quarter-smoked cigarette and almost immediately demanded another.

"You've been a little immoderate with your statistics," said Melville.

Chatteris said something that struck Melville as having somehow been said before. "Election, progress, good of humanity, public spirit. None of these things interest me really," he said. "At least, not just now."

Melville waited.

"One gets brought up in an atmosphere in which it's always being whispered that one should go for a career. You learn it at your mother's knee. They never give you time to find out what you really want, they keep on shoving you at that. They form your character. They rule your mind. They rush you into it."

"They didn't rush me," said Melville.

"They rushed me, anyhow. And here I am!"

"You don't want a career?"

"Well-- Look what it is."

"Oh! if you look at what things are!"

"First of all, the messing about to get into the House. These confounded parties mean nothing--absolutely nothing. They aren't even decent factions. You blither to damned committees of damned tradesmen whose sole idea for this world is to get overpaid for their self-respect; you whisper and hobnob with local solicitors and get yourself seen about with them; you ask about the charities and institutions, and lunch and chatter and chum with every conceivable form of human conceit and pushfulness and trickery----"

He broke off. "It isn't as if _they_ were up to anything! They're working in their way, just as you are working in your way. It's the same game with all of them. They chase a phantom gratification, they toil and quarrel and envy, night and day, in the perpetual attempt to persuade themselves in spite of everything that they are real and a success----"

He stopped and smoked.

Melville was spiteful. "Yes," he admitted, "but I thought _your_ little movement was to be something more than party politics and self-advancement----?"

He left his sentence interrogatively incomplete.

"The condition of the poor," he said.

"Well?" said Chatteris, regarding him with a sort of stony admission in his blue eyes.

Melville dodged the look. "At Sandgate," he said, "there was, you know, a certain atmosphere of belief----"

"I know," said Chatteris for the second time.

"That's the devil of it!" said Chatteris after a pause.

"If I don't believe in the game I'm playing, if I'm left high and dry on this shoal, with the tide of belief gone past me, it isn't _my_ planning, anyhow. I know the decent thing I ought to do. I mean to do it; in the end I mean to do it; I'm talking in this way to relieve my mind. I've started the game and I must see it out; I've put my hand to the plough and I mustn't go back. That's why I came to London--to get it over with myself. It was running up against you, set me off. You caught me at the crisis."

"Ah!" said Melville.

"But for all that, the thing is as I said--none of these things interest me really. It won't alter the fact that I am committed to fight a phantom election about nothing in particular, for a party that's been dead ten years. And if the ghosts win, go into the Parliament as a constituent spectre.... There it is--as a mental phenomenon!"

He reiterated his cardinal article. "The interest is dead," he said, "the will has no soul."

He became more critical. He bent a little closer to Melville's ear. "It isn't really that I don't believe. When I say I don't believe in these things I go too far. I do. I know, the electioneering, the intriguing is a means to an end. There is work to be done, sound work, and important work. Only----"

Melville turned an eye on him over his cigarette end.

Chatteris met it, seemed for a moment to cling to it. He became absurdly confidential. He was evidently in the direst need of a confidential ear.

"I don't want to do it. When I sit down to it, square myself down in the chair, you know, and say, now for the rest of my life this is IT--this is your life, Chatteris; there comes a sort of terror, Melville."

"H'm," said Melville, and turned away. Then he turned on Chatteris with the air of a family physician, and tapped his shoulder three times as he spoke. "You've had too much statistics, Chatteris," he said.

He let that soak in. Then he turned about towards his interlocutor, and toyed with a club ash tray. "It's every day has overtaken you," he said. "You can't see the wood for the trees. You forget the spacious design you are engaged upon, in the heavy details of the moment. You are like a painter who has been working hard upon something very small and exacting in a corner. You want to step back and look at the whole thing."

"No," said Chatteris, "that isn't quite it."

Melville indicated that he knew better.

"I keep on, stepping back and looking at it," said Chatteris. "Just lately I've scarcely done anything else. I'll admit it's a spacious and noble thing--political work done well--only-- I admire it, but it doesn't grip my imagination. That's where the trouble comes in."

"What _does_ grip your imagination?" asked Melville. He was absolutely certain the Sea Lady had been talking this paralysis into Chatteris, and he wanted to see just how far she had gone. "For example," he tested, "are there--by any chance--other dreams?"

Chatteris gave no sign at the phrase. Melville dismissed his suspicion. "What do you mean--other dreams?" asked Chatteris.

"Is there conceivably another way--another sort of life--some other aspect----?"

"It's out of the question," said Chatteris. He added, rather remarkably, "Adeline's awfully good."

My cousin Melville acquiesced silently in Adeline's goodness.

"All this, you know, is a mood. My life is made for me--and it's a very good life. It's better than I deserve."

"Heaps," said Melville.

"Much," said Chatteris defiantly.

"Ever so much," endorsed Melville.

"Let's talk of other things," said Chatteris. "It's what even the street boys call _mawbid_ nowadays to doubt for a moment the absolute final all-this-and-nothing-else-in-the-worldishness of whatever you happen to be doing."

My cousin Melville, however, could think of no other sufficiently interesting topic. "You left them all right at Sandgate?" he asked, after a pause.

"Except little Bunting."

"Seedy?"

"Been fishing."

"Of course. Breezes and the spring tides.... And Miss Waters?"

Chatteris shot a suspicious glance at him. He affected the offhand style. "_She's_ quite well," he said. "Looks just as charming as ever."

"She really means that canvassing?"

"She's spoken of it again."

"She'll do a lot for you," said Melville, and left a fine wide pause.

Chatteris assumed the tone of a man who gossips.

"Who is this Miss Waters?" he asked.

"A very charming person," said Melville and said no more.

Chatteris waited and his pretence of airy gossip vanished. He became very much in earnest.

"Look here," he said. "Who is this Miss Waters?"

"How should _I_ know?" prevaricated Melville.

"Well, you do know. And the others know. Who is she?"

Melville met his eyes. "Won't they tell you?" he asked.

"That's just it," said Chatteris.

"Why do you want to know?"

"Why shouldn't I know?"

"There's a sort of promise to keep it dark."

"Keep _what_ dark?"

My cousin gestured.

"It can't be anything wrong?" My cousin made no sign.

"She may have had experiences?"

My cousin reflected a moment on the possibilities of the deep-sea life. "She has had them," he said.

"I don't care, if she has."

There came a pause.

"Look here, Melville," said Chatteris, "I want to know this. Unless it's a thing to be specially kept from me.... I don't like being among a lot of people who treat me as an outsider. What is this something about Miss Waters?"

"What does Miss Glendower say?"

"Vague things. She doesn't like her and she won't say why. And Mrs. Bunting goes about with discretion written all over her. And she herself looks at you-- And that maid of hers looks-- The thing's worrying me."

"Why don't you ask the lady herself?"

"How can I, till I know what it is? Confound it! I'm asking _you_ plainly enough."

"Well," said Melville, and at the moment he had really decided to tell Chatteris. But he hung upon the manner of presentation. He thought in the moment to say, "The truth is, she is a mermaid." Then as instantly he perceived how incredible this would be. He always suspected Chatteris of a capacity for being continental and romantic. The man might fly out at him for saying such a thing of a lady.

A dreadful doubt fell upon Melville. As you know, he had never seen that tail with his own eyes. In these surroundings there came to him such an incredulity of the Sea Lady as he had not felt even when first Mrs. Bunting told him of her. All about him was an atmosphere of solid reality, such as one can breathe only in a first-class London club. Everywhere ponderous arm-chairs met the eye. There were massive tables in abundance and match-boxes of solid rock. The matches were of some specially large, heavy sort. On a ponderous elephant-legged green baize table near at hand were several copies of the _Times_, the current _Punch_, an inkpot of solid brass, and a paper weight of lead. _There are other dreams!_ It seemed impossible. The breathing of an eminent person in a chair in the far corner became very distinct in that interval. It was heavy and resolute like the sound of a stone-mason's saw. It insisted upon itself as the touchstone of reality. It seemed to say that at the first whisper of a thing so utterly improbable as a mermaid it would snort and choke.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," said Melville.

"Well, tell me--anyhow."

My cousin looked at an empty chair beside him. It was evidently stuffed with the very best horse-hair that money could procure, stuffed with infinite skill and an almost religious care. It preached in the open invitation of its expanded arms that man does not live by bread alone--inasmuch as afterwards he needs a nap. An utterly dreamless chair!

Mermaids?

He felt that he was after all quite possibly the victim of a foolish delusion, hypnotised by Mrs. Bunting's beliefs. Was there not some more plausible interpretation, some phrase that would lie out bridgeways from the plausible to the truth?

"It's no good," he groaned at last.

Chatteris had been watching him furtively.

"Oh, I don't care a hang," he said, and shied his second cigarette into the massively decorated fireplace. "It's no affair of mine."

Then quite abruptly he sprang to his feet and gesticulated with an ineffectual hand.

"You needn't," he said, and seemed to intend to say many regrettable things. Meanwhile until his intention ripened he sawed the air with his ineffectual hand. I fancy he ended by failing to find a thing sufficiently regrettable to express the pungency of the moment. He flung about and went towards the door.

"Don't!" he said to the back of the newspaper of the breathing member.

"If you don't want to," he said to the respectful waiter at the door.

The hall-porter heard that he didn't care--he was damned if he did!

"He might be one of these here guests," said the hall-porter, greatly shocked. "That's what comes of lettin' 'em in so young."

VI

Melville overcame an impulse to follow him.

"Confound the fellow!" said he.

And then as the whole outburst came into focus, he said with still more emphasis, "Confound the fellow!"

He stood up and became aware that the member who had been asleep was now regarding him with malevolent eyes. He perceived it was a hard and invincible malevolence, and that no petty apologetics of demeanour could avail against it. He turned about and went towards the door.

The interview had done my cousin good. His misery and distress had lifted. He was presently bathed in a profound moral indignation, and that is the very antithesis of doubt and unhappiness. The more he thought it over, the more his indignation with Chatteris grew. That sudden unreasonable outbreak altered all the perspectives of the case. He wished very much that he could meet Chatteris again and discuss the whole matter from a new footing.

"Think of it!" He thought so vividly and so verbally that he was nearly talking to himself as he went along. It shaped itself into an outspoken discourse in his mind.

"Was there ever a more ungracious, ungrateful, unreasonable creature than this same Chatteris? He was the spoiled child of Fortune; things came to him, things were given to him, his very blunders brought more to him than other men's successes. Out of every thousand men, nine hundred and ninety-nine might well find food for envy in this way luck had served him. Many a one has toiled all his life and taken at last gratefully the merest fraction of all that had thrust itself upon this insatiable thankless young man. Even I," thought my cousin, "might envy him--in several ways. And then, at the mere first onset of duty, nay!--at the mere first whisper of restraint, this insubordination, this protest and flight!

"Think!" urged my cousin, "of the common lot of men. Think of the many who suffer from hunger----"

(It was a painful Socialistic sort of line to take, but in his mood of moral indignation my cousin pursued it relentlessly.)

"Think of many who suffer from hunger, who lead lives of unremitting toil, who go fearful, who go squalid, and withal strive, in a sort of dumb, resolute way, their utmost to do their duty, or at any rate what they think to be their duty. Think of the chaste poor women in the world! Think again of the many honest souls who aspire to the service of their kind, and are so hemmed about and preoccupied that they may not give it! And then this pitiful creature comes, with his mental gifts, his gifts of position and opportunity, the stimulus of great ideas, and a _fiancee_, who is not only rich and beautiful--she _is_ beautiful!--but also the best of all possible helpers for him. And he turns away. It isn't good enough. It takes no hold upon his imagination, if you please. It isn't beautiful enough for him, and that's the plain truth of the matter. What does the man _want_? What does he expect?..."

My cousin's moral indignation took him the whole length of Piccadilly, and along by Rotten Row, and along the flowery garden walks almost into Kensington High Street, and so around by the Serpentine to his home, and it gave him such an appetite for dinner as he had not had for many days. Life was bright for him all that evening, and he sat down at last, at two o'clock in the morning, before a needlessly lit, delightfully fusillading fire in his flat to smoke one sound cigar before he went to bed.

"No," he said suddenly, "I am not _mawbid_ either. I take the gifts the gods will give me. I try to make myself happy, and a few other people happy, too, to do a few little duties decently, and that is enough for me. I don't look too deeply into things, and I don't look too widely about things. A few old simple ideals----

"H'm.

"Chatteris is a dreamer, with an impossible, extravagant discontent. What does he dream of?... Three parts he is a dreamer and the fourth part--spoiled child."

"Dreamer...."

"Other dreams...."

"What other dreams could she mean?"

My cousin fell into profound musings. Then he started, looked about him, saw the time by his Rathbone clock, got up suddenly and went to bed.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

THE CRISIS

I

The crisis came about a week from that time--I say about because of Melville's conscientious inexactness in these matters. And so far as the crisis goes, I seem to get Melville at his best. He was keenly interested, keenly observant, and his more than average memory took some excellent impressions. To my mind, at any rate, two at least of these people come out, fuller and more convincingly than anywhere else in this painfully disinterred story. He has given me here an Adeline I seem to believe in, and something much more like Chatteris than any of the broken fragments I have had to go upon, and amplify and fudge together so far. And for all such transient lucidities in this mysterious story, the reader no doubt will echo my Heaven be thanked!

Melville was called down to participate in the crisis at Sandgate by a telegram from Mrs. Bunting, and his first exponent of the situation was Fred Bunting.

"_Come down. Urgent. Please_," was the irresistible message from Mrs. Bunting. My cousin took the early train and arrived at Sandgate in the forenoon.

He was told that Mrs. Bunting was upstairs with Miss Glendower and that she implored him to wait until she could leave her charge. "Miss Glendower not well, then?" said Melville. "No, sir, not at all well," said the housemaid, evidently awaiting a further question. "Where are the others?" he asked casually. The three younger young ladies had gone to Hythe, said the housemaid, with a marked omission of the Sea Lady. Melville has an intense dislike of questioning servants on points at issue, so he asked nothing at all concerning Miss Waters. This general absence of people from the room of familiar occupation conveyed the same suggested warning of crisis as the telegram. The housemaid waited an instant longer and withdrew.

He stood for a moment in the drawing-room and then walked out upon the veranda. He perceived a richly caparisoned figure advancing towards him. It was Fred Bunting. He had been taking advantage of the general desertion of home to bathe from the house. He was wearing an umbrageous white cotton hat and a striped blanket, and a more aggressively manly pipe than any fully adult male would ever dream of smoking, hung from the corner of his mouth.

"Hello!" he said. "The mater sent for you?"

Melville admitted the truth of this theory.

"There's ructions," said Fred, and removed the pipe. The act offered conversation.

"Where's Miss Waters?"

"Gone."

"Back?"

"Lord, no! Catch her! She's gone to Lummidge's Hotel. With her maid. Took a suite."

"Why----"

"The mater made a row with her."

"Whatever for?"

"Harry."

My cousin stared at the situation.

"It broke out," said Fred.

"What broke out?"

"The row. Harry's gone daft on her, Addy says."

"On Miss Waters?"

"Rather. Mooney. Didn't care for his electioneering--didn't care for his ordinary nourishment. Loose ends. Didn't mention it to Adeline, but she began to see it. Asked questions. Next day, went off. London. She asked what was up. Three days' silence. Then--wrote to her."

Fred intensified all this by raising his eyebrows, pulling down the corners of his mouth and nodding portentously. "Eh?" he said, and then to make things clearer: "Wrote a letter."

"He didn't write to her about Miss Waters?"

"Don't know what he wrote about. Don't suppose he mentioned her name, but I dare say he made it clear enough. All I know is that everything in the house felt like elastic pulled tighter than it ought to be for two whole days--everybody in a sort of complicated twist--and then there was a snap. All that time Addy was writing letters to him and tearing 'em up, and no one could quite make it out. Everyone looked blue except the Sea Lady. She kept her own lovely pink. And at the end of that time the mater began asking things, Adeline chucked writing, gave the mater half a hint, mater took it all in in an instant and the thing burst."

"Miss Glendower didn't----?"

"No, the mater did. Put it pretty straight too--as the mater can.... _She_ didn't deny it. Said she couldn't help herself, and that he was as much hers as Adeline's. I _heard_ that," said Fred shamelessly. "Pretty thick, eh?--considering he's engaged. And the mater gave it her pretty straight. Said, 'I've been very much deceived in you, Miss Waters--very much indeed.' I heard her...."

"And then?"

"Asked her to go. Said she'd requited us ill for taking her up when nobody but a fisherman would have looked at her."

"She said that?"

"Well, words to that effect."

"And Miss Waters went?"

"In a first-class cab, maid and boxes in another, all complete. Perfect lady.... Couldn't have believed if I hadn't seen it--the tail, I mean."

"And Miss Glendower?"

"Addy? Oh, she's been going it. Comes downstairs and does the pale-faced heroine and goes upstairs and does the broken-hearted part. _I_ know. It's all very well. You never had sisters. You know----"

Fred held his pipe elaborately out of the way and protruded his face to a confidential nearness.

"I believe they half like it," said Fred, in a confidential half whisper. "Such a go, you know. Mabel pretty near as bad. And the girls. All making the very most they can of it. Me! I think Chatteris was the only man alive to hear 'em. _I_ couldn't get up emotion as they do, if my feet were being flayed. Cheerful home, eh? For holidays."

"Where's--the principal gentleman?" asked Melville a little grimly. "In London?"

"Unprincipled gentleman, I call him," said Fred. "He's stopping down here at the Metropole. Stuck."

"Down here? Stuck?"

"Rather. Stuck and set about."

My cousin tried for sidelights. "What's his attitude?" he asked.

"Slump," said Fred with intensity.

"This little blow-off has rather astonished him," he explained. "When he wrote to say that the election didn't interest him for a bit, but he hoped to pull around----"

"You said you didn't know what he wrote."

"I do that much," said Fred. "He no more thought they'd have spotted that it meant Miss Waters than a baby. But women are so thundering sharp, you know. They're born spotters. How it'll all end----"

"But why has he come to the Metropole?"

"Middle of the stage, I suppose," said Fred.

"What's his attitude?"

"Says he's going to see Adeline and explain everything--and doesn't do it.... Puts it off. And Adeline, as far as I can gather, says that if he doesn't come down soon, she's hanged if she'll see him, much as her heart may be broken, and all that, if she doesn't. You know."

"Naturally," said Melville, rather inconsecutively. "And he doesn't?"

"Doesn't stir."

"Does he see--the other lady?"

"We don't know. We can't watch him. But if he does he's clever----"

"Why?"

"There's about a hundred blessed relatives of his in the place--came like crows for a corpse. I never saw such a lot. Talk about a man of good old family--it's decaying! I never saw such a high old family in my life. Aunts they are chiefly."

"Aunts?"

"Aunts. Say, they've rallied round him. How they got hold of it I don't know. Like vultures. Unless the mater-- But they're here. They're all at him--using their influence with him, threatening to cut off legacies and all that. There's one old girl at Bate's, Lady Poynting Mallow--least bit horsey, but about as all right as any of 'em--who's been down here twice. Seems a trifle disappointed in Adeline. And there's two aunts at Wampach's--you know the sort that stop at Wampach's--regular hothouse flowers--a watering-potful of real icy cold water would kill both of 'em. And there's one come over from the Continent, short hair, short skirts--regular terror--she's at the Pavilion. They're all chasing round saying, 'Where is this woman-fish sort of thing? Let me peek!'"

"Does that constitute the hundred relatives?"

"Practically. The Wampachers are sending for a Bishop who used to be his schoolmaster----"

"No stone unturned, eh?"

"None."

"And has he found out yet----"

"That she's a mermaid? I don't believe he has. The pater went up to tell him. Of course, he was a bit out of breath and embarrassed. And Chatteris cut him down. 'At least let me hear nothing against her,' he said. And the pater took that and came away. Good old pater. Eh?"

"And the aunts?"