Herbert Wells - The Sea Lady

Melville looked up at her. He noticed she had hung on the latter name. “Decidedly,” he said. “It’s just what they would do.”

Then he spoke again. “Chatteris?” he said.

“Yes,” said she.

“I thought so,” said Melville.

The Sea Lady regarded him gravely. They scrutinised each other with an unprecedented intimacy. Melville was suddenly direct. It was a discovery that it seemed he ought to have made all along. He felt quite unaccountably bitter; he spoke with a twitch of the mouth and his voice had a note of accusation. “You want to talk about him.”

She nodded—still grave.

“Well, I don’t.” He changed his note. “But I will if you wish it.”

“I thought you would.”

“Oh, you know,” said Melville, discovering his extinct cigarette was within reach of a vindictive heel.

She said nothing.

“Well?” said Melville.

“I saw him first,” she apologised, “some years ago.”

“Where?”

“In the South Seas—near Tonga.”

“And that is really what you came for?”

This time her manner was convincing. She admitted, “Yes.”

Melville was carefully impartial. “He’s sightly,” he admitted, “and well-built and a decent chap—a decent chap. But I don’t see why you——”

He went off at a tangent. “He didn’t see you——?”

“Oh, no.”

Melville’s pose and tone suggested a mind of extreme liberality. “I don’t see why you came,” he said. “Nor what you mean to do. You see”—with an air of noting a trifling but valid obstacle—“there’s Miss Glendower.”

“Is there?” she said.

“Well, isn’t there?”

“That’s just it,” she said.

“And besides after all, you know, why should you——?”

“I admit it’s unreasonable,” she said. “But why reason about it? It’s a matter of the imagination——”

“For him?”

“How should I know how it takes him? That is what I want to know.”

Melville looked her in the eyes again. “You know, you’re not playing fair,” he said.

“To her?”

“To any one.”

“Why?”

“Because you are immortal—and unincumbered. Because you can do everything you want to do—and we cannot. I don’t know why we cannot, but we cannot. Here we are, with our short lives and our little souls to save, or lose, fussing for our little concerns. And you, out of the elements, come and beckon——”

“The elements have their rights,” she said. And then: “The elements are the elements, you know. That is what you forget.”

“Imagination?”

“Certainly. That’s the element. Those elements of your chemists——”

“Yes?”

“Are all imagination. There isn’t any other.” She went on: “And all the elements of your life, the life you imagine you are living, the little things you must do, the little cares, the extraordinary little duties, the day by day, the hypnotic limitations—all these things are a fancy that has taken hold of you too strongly for you to shake off. You daren’t, you mustn’t, you can’t. To us who watch you——”

“You watch us?”

“Oh, yes. We watch you, and sometimes we envy you. Not only for the dry air and the sunlight, and the shadows of trees, and the feeling of morning, and the pleasantness of many such things, but because your lives begin and end—because you look towards an end.”

She reverted to her former topic. “But you are so limited, so tied! The little time you have, you use so poorly. You begin and you end, and all the time between it is as if you were enchanted; you are afraid to do this that would be delightful to do, you must do that, though you know all the time it is stupid and disagreeable. Just think of the things—even the little things—you mustn’t do. Up there on the Leas in this hot weather all the people are sitting in stuffy ugly clothes—ever so much too much clothes, hot tight boots, you know, when they have the most lovely pink feet, some of them—we see ,—and they are all with little to talk about and nothing to look at, and bound not to do all sorts of natural things and bound to do all sorts of preposterous things. Why are they bound? Why are they letting life slip by them? Just as if they wouldn’t all of them presently be dead! Suppose you were to go up there in a bathing dress and a white cotton hat——”

“It wouldn’t be proper!” cried Melville.

“Why not?”

“Why not?”

“It would be outrageous!”

“But any one may see you like that on the beach!”

“That’s different.”

“It isn’t different. You dream it’s different. And in just the same way you dream all the other things are proper or improper or good or bad to do. Because you are in a dream, a fantastic, unwholesome little dream. So small, so infinitely small! I saw you the other day dreadfully worried by a spot of ink on your sleeve—almost the whole afternoon.”

My cousin looked distressed. She abandoned the ink-spot.

“Your life, I tell you, is a dream—a dream, and you can’t wake out of it——”

“And if so, why do you tell me?”

She made no answer for a space.

“Why do you tell me?” he insisted.

He heard the rustle of her movement as she bent towards him.

She came warmly close to him. She spoke in gently confidential undertone, as one who imparts a secret that is not to be too lightly given. “Because,” she said, “there are better dreams.”

For a moment it seemed to Melville that he had been addressed by something quite other than the pleasant lady in the bath chair before him. “But how—?” he began and stopped. He remained silent with a perplexed face. She leaned back and glanced away from him, and when at last she turned and spoke again, specific realities closed in on him once more.

“Why shouldn’t I,” she asked, “if I want to?”

“Shouldn’t what?”

“If I fancy Chatteris.”

“One might think of obstacles,” he reflected.

“He’s not hers,” she said.

“In a way, he’s trying to be,” said Melville.

“Trying to be! He has to be what he is. Nothing can make him hers. If you weren’t dreaming you would see that.” My cousin was silent. “She’s not real ,” she went on. “She’s a mass of fancies and vanities. She gets everything out of books. She gets herself out of a book. You can see her doing it here.… What is she seeking? What is she trying to do? All this work, all this political stuff of hers? She talks of the condition of the poor! What is the condition of the poor? A dreary tossing on the bed of existence, a perpetual fear of consequences that perpetually distresses them. Lives of anxiety they lead, because they do not know what a dream the whole thing is. Suppose they were not anxious and afraid.… And what does she care for the condition of the poor, after all? It is only a point of departure in her dream. In her heart she does not want their dreams to be happier, in her heart she has no passion for them, only her dream is that she should be prominently doing good, asserting herself, controlling their affairs amidst thanks and praise and blessings. Her dream! Of serious things!—a rout of phantoms pursuing a phantom ignis fatuus—the afterglow of a mirage. Vanity of vanities——”

“It’s real enough to her.”

“As real as she can make it, you know. But she isn’t real herself. She begins badly.”

“And he, you know——”