The Sea Lady

“But several mornings ago?”

“Could it have been Mr. Melville?.. I know! You mean Mr. Chatteris! I remember, he came down with us one morning. A tall young man with fair – rather curlyish you might say – hair, wasn’t it? And a rather thoughtful face. He was dressed all in white linen and he sat on the beach.”

“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 the elder Miss Glendower. He was stopping here for a night or so. I daresay he’ll come again on his way back from Paris. Dear me! Fancy my having a 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 with more animation, “Of course, now I think, he’s much too old to be your son!”

“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; and then, “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 three months.”

“Dear me!” said the Sea Lady. “She seemed – And is he very much in love with 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 the very position to help him – ”

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?”