Herbert Wells - The Sea Lady

“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.