Herbert Wells - The Sea Lady

“Stuff that the public won’t believe aren’t facts.”

“I don’t care if you had it from—anybody. Stuff that the public won’t believe aren’t facts. Being true only makes ’em worse. They buy our paper to swallow it and it’s got to go down easy. When I printed you that note and headline I thought you was up to a lark. I thought you was on to a mixed bathing scandal or something of that sort—with juice in it. The sort of thing that all understand. You know when you went down to Folkestone you were going to describe what Salisbury and all the rest of them wear upon the Leas. And start a discussion on the acclimatisation of the café. And all that. And then you get on to this (unprintable epithet) nonsense!”

“But Lord Salisbury—he doesn’t go to Folkestone.”

Banghurst shrugged his shoulders over a hopeless case. “What the deuce,” he said, addressing his inkpot in plaintive tones, “does that matter?”

The young man reflected. He addressed Banghurst’s back after a pause. His voice had flattened a little. “I might go over this and do it up as a lark perhaps. Make it a comic dialogue sketch with a man who really believed in it—or something like that. It’s a beastly lot of copy to get slumped, you know.”

“Nohow,” said Banghurst. “Not in any shape. No! Why! They’d think it clever. They’d think you was making game of them. They hate things they think are clever!”

The young man made as if to reply, but Banghurst’s back expressed quite clearly that the interview was at an end.

“Nohow,” repeated Banghurst just when it seemed he had finished altogether.

“I may take it to the Gunfire then?”

Banghurst suggested an alternative.

“Very well,” said the young man, heated, “the Gunfire it is.”

But in that he was reckoning without the editor of the Gunfire .

It must have been quite soon after that, that I myself heard the first mention of the mermaid, little recking that at last it would fall to me to write her history. I was on one of my rare visits to London, and Micklethwaite was giving me lunch at the Penwiper Club, certainly one of the best dozen literary clubs in London. I noted the rising young journalist at a table near the door, lunching alone. All about him tables were vacant, though the other parts of the room were crowded. He sat with his face towards the door, and he kept looking up whenever any one came in, as if he expected some one who never came. Once distinctly I saw him beckon to a man, but the man did not respond.

“Look here, Micklethwaite,” I said, “why is everybody avoiding that man over there? I noticed just now in the smoking-room that he seemed to be trying to get into conversation with some one and that a kind of taboo——”

Micklethwaite stared over his fork. “Ra-ther,” he said.

“But what’s he done?”

“He’s a fool,” said Micklethwaite with his mouth full, evidently annoyed. “Ugh,” he said as soon as he was free to do so.

I waited a little while.

“What’s he done?” I ventured.

Micklethwaite did not answer for a moment and crammed things into his mouth vindictively, bread and all sorts of things. Then leaning towards me in a confidential manner he made indignant noises which I could not clearly distinguish as words.

“Oh!” I said, when he had done.

“Yes,” said Micklethwaite. He swallowed and then poured himself wine—splashing the tablecloth.

“He had me for an hour very nearly the other day.”

“Yes?” I said.

“Silly fool,” said Micklethwaite.

I was afraid it was all over, but luckily he gave me an opening again after gulping down his wine.

“He leads you on to argue,” he said.

“That——?”

“That he can’t prove it.”

“Yes?”

“And then he shows you he can. Just showing off how damned ingenious he is.”

I was a little confused. “Prove what?” I asked.

“Haven’t I been telling you?” said Micklethwaite, growing very red. “About this confounded mermaid of his at Folkestone.”

“He says there is one?”

“Yes, he does,” said Micklethwaite, going purple and staring at me very hard. He seemed to ask mutely whether I of all people proposed to turn on him and back up this infamous scoundrel. I thought for a moment he would have apoplexy, but happily he remembered his duty as my host. So he turned very suddenly on a meditative waiter for not removing our plates.

“Had any golf lately?” I said to Micklethwaite, when the plates and the remains of the waiter had gone away. Golf always does Micklethwaite good except when he is actually playing. Then, I am told— If I were Mrs. Bunting I should break off and raise my eyebrows and both hands at this point, to indicate how golf acts on Micklethwaite when he is playing.

I turned my mind to feigning an interest in golf—a game that in truth I despise and hate as I despise and hate nothing else in this world. Imagine a great fat creature like Micklethwaite, a creature who ought to wear a turban and a long black robe to hide his grossness, whacking a little white ball for miles and miles with a perfect surgery of instruments, whacking it either with a babyish solemnity or a childish rage as luck may have decided, whacking away while his country goes to the devil, and incidentally training an innocent-eyed little boy to swear and be a tip-hunting loafer. That’s golf! However, I controlled my all too facile sneer and talked of golf and the relative merits of golf links as I might talk to a child about buns or distract a puppy with the whisper of “rats,” and when at last I could look at the rising young journalist again our lunch had come to an end.

I saw that he was talking with a greater air of freedom than it is usual to display to club waiters, to the man who held his coat. The man looked incredulous but respectful, and was answering shortly but politely.

When we went out this little conversation was still going on. The waiter was holding the rising young journalist’s soft felt hat and the rising young journalist was fumbling in his coat pocket with a thick mass of papers.

“It’s tremendous. I’ve got most of it here,” he was saying as we went by. “I don’t know if you’d care——”

“I get very little time for reading, sir,” the waiter was replying.

So far I have been very full, I know, and verisimilitude has been my watchword rather than the true affidavit style. But if I have made it clear to the reader just how the Sea Lady landed and just how it was possible for her to land and become a member of human society without any considerable excitement on the part of that society, such poor pains as I have taken to tint and shadow and embellish the facts at my disposal will not have been taken in vain. She positively and quietly settled down with the Buntings. Within a fortnight she had really settled down so thoroughly that, save for her exceptional beauty and charm and the occasional faint touches of something a little indefinable in her smile, she had become a quite passable and credible human being. She was a cripple, indeed, and her lower limb was most pathetically swathed and put in a sort of case, but it was quite generally understood—I am afraid at Mrs. Bunting’s initiative—that presently they —Mrs. Bunting said “they,” which was certainly almost as far or even a little farther than legitimate prevarication may go—would be as well as ever.