Herbert Wells - The Sea Lady

“Everything? Yes, but just what is everything?”

“That she had led him on.”

“Miss Waters?”

“Yes.”

My cousin reflected. So that was what they considered to be everything! “I wish I knew just where he stood,” he said at last, and followed Mrs. Bunting luncheonward. In the course of that meal, which was tête-à-tête , it became almost unsatisfactorily evident what a great relief Melville’s consent to interview Chatteris was to Mrs. Bunting. Indeed, she seemed to consider herself relieved from the greater portion of her responsibility in the matter, since Melville was bearing her burden. She sketched out her defence against the accusations that had no doubt been levelled at her, explicitly and implicitly.

“How was I to know?” she asked, and she told over again the story of that memorable landing, but with new, extenuating details. It was Adeline herself who had cried first, “She must be saved!” Mrs. Bunting made a special point of that. “And what else was there for me to do?” she asked.

And as she talked, the problem before my cousin assumed graver and yet graver proportions. He perceived more and more clearly the complexity of the situation with which he was entrusted. In the first place it was not at all clear that Miss Glendower was willing to receive back her lover except upon terms, and the Sea Lady, he was quite sure, did not mean to release him from any grip she had upon him. They were preparing to treat an elemental struggle as if it were an individual case. It grew more and more evident to him how entirely Mrs. Bunting overlooked the essentially abnormal nature of the Sea Lady, how absolutely she regarded the business as a mere every-day vacillation, a commonplace outbreak of that jilting spirit which dwells, covered deep, perhaps, but never entirely eradicated, in the heart of man; and how confidently she expected him, with a little tactful remonstrance and pressure, to restore the status quo ante .

As for Chatteris!—Melville shook his head at the cheese, and answered Mrs. Bunting abstractedly.

“She wants to speak to you,” said Mrs. Bunting, and Melville with a certain trepidation went upstairs. He went up to the big landing with the seats, to save Adeline the trouble of coming down. She appeared dressed in a black and violet tea gown with much lace, and her dark hair was done with a simple carefulness that suited it. She was pale, and her eyes showed traces of tears, but she had a certain dignity that differed from her usual bearing in being quite unconscious.

She gave him a limp hand and spoke in an exhausted voice.

“You know—all?” she asked.

“All the outline, anyhow.”

“Why has he done this to me?”

Melville looked profoundly sympathetic through a pause.

“I feel,” she said, “that it isn’t coarseness.”

“Certainly not,” said Melville.

“It is some mystery of the imagination that I cannot understand. I should have thought—his career at any rate—would have appealed.…” She shook her head and regarded a pot of ferns fixedly for a space.

“He has written to you?” asked Melville.

“Three times,” she said, looking up.

Melville hesitated to ask the extent of that correspondence, but she left no need for that.

“I had to ask him,” she said. “He kept it all from me, and I had to force it from him before he would tell.”

“Tell!” said Melville, “what?”

“What he felt for her and what he felt for me.”

“But did he——?”

“He has made it clearer. But still even now. No, I don’t understand.”

She turned slowly and watched Melville’s face as she spoke: “You know, Mr. Melville, that this has been an enormous shock to me. I suppose I never really knew him. I suppose I—idealised him. I thought he cared for—our work at any rate.… He did care for our work. He believed in it. Surely he believed in it.”

“He does,” said Melville.

“And then— But how can he?”

“He is—he is a man with rather a strong imagination.”

“Or a weak will?”

“Relatively—yes.”

“It is so strange,” she sighed. “It is so inconsistent. It is like a child catching at a new toy. Do you know, Mr. Melville”—she hesitated—“all this has made me feel old. I feel very much older, very much wiser than he is. I cannot help it. I am afraid it is for all women … to feel that sometimes.”

She reflected profoundly. “For all women— The child, man! I see now just what Sarah Grand meant by that.”

She smiled a wan smile. “I feel just as if he had been a naughty child. And I—I worshipped him, Mr. Melville,” she said, and her voice quivered.

My cousin coughed and turned about to stare hard out of the window. He was, he perceived, much more shockingly inadequate even than he had expected to be.

“If I thought she could make him happy!” she said presently, leaving a hiatus of generous self-sacrifice.

“The case is—complicated,” said Melville.

Her voice went on, clear and a little high, resigned, impenetrably assured.

“But she would not. All his better side, all his serious side— She would miss it and ruin it all.”

“Does he—” began Melville and repented of the temerity of his question.

“Yes?” she said.

“Does he—ask to be released?”

“No.… He wants to come back to me.”

“And you——”

“He doesn’t come.”

“But do you—do you want him back?”

“How can I say, Mr. Melville? He does not say certainly even that he wants to come back.”

My cousin Melville looked perplexed. He lived on the superficies of emotion, and these complexities in matters he had always assumed were simple, put him out.

“There are times,” she said, “when it seems to me that my love for him is altogether dead.… Think of the disillusionment—the shock—the discovery of such weakness.”

My cousin lifted his eyebrows and shook his head in agreement.

“His feet—to find his feet were of clay!”

There came a pause.

“It seems as if I have never loved him. And then—and then I think of all the things that still might be.”

Her voice made him look up, and he saw that her mouth was set hard and tears were running down her cheeks.

It occurred to my cousin, he says, that he would touch her hand in a sympathetic manner, and then it occurred to him that he wouldn’t. Her words rang in his thoughts for a space, and then he said somewhat tardily, “He may still be all those things.”

“I suppose he may,” she said slowly and without colour. The weeping moment had passed.

“What is she?” she changed abruptly. “What is this being, who has come between him and all the realities of life? What is there about her—? And why should I have to compete with her, because he—because he doesn’t know his own mind?”

“For a man,” said Melville, “to know his own mind is—to have exhausted one of the chief interests in life. After that—! A cultivated extinct volcano—if ever it was a volcano.”

He reflected egotistically for a space. Then with a secret start he came back to consider her.

“What is there,” she said, with that deliberate attempt at clearness which was one of her antipathetic qualities for Melville—“what is there that she has, that she offers, that I ——?”

Melville winced at this deliberate proposal of appalling comparisons. All the catlike quality in his soul came to his aid. He began to edge away, and walk obliquely and generally to shirk the issue. “My dear Miss Glendower,” he said, and tried to make that seem an adequate reply.