Part 15 (1/2)

”He will ravel out,” said the Sea Lady.

”I think you misjudge him about that work of his, anyhow,” said Melville. ”He's a man rather divided against himself.” He added abruptly, ”We all are.” He recovered himself from the generality. ”It's vague, I admit, a sort of vague wish to do something decent, you know, that he has----”

”A sort of vague wish,” she conceded; ”but----”

”He means well,” said Melville, clinging to his proposition.

”He means nothing. Only very dimly he suspects----”

”Yes?”

”What you too are beginning to suspect.... That other things may be conceivable even if they are not possible. That this life of yours is not everything. That it is not to be taken too seriously. Because ...

there are better dreams!”

The song of the sirens was in her voice; my cousin would not look at her face. ”I know nothing of any other dreams,” he said. ”One has oneself and this life, and that is enough to manage. What other dreams can there be? Anyhow, we are in the dream--we have to accept it. Besides, you know, that's going off the question. We were talking of Chatteris, and why you have come for him. Why should you come, why should any one outside come--into this world?”

”Because we are permitted to come--we immortals. And why, if we choose to do so, and taste this life that pa.s.ses and continues, as rain that falls to the ground, why should we not do it? Why should we abstain?”

”And Chatteris?”

”If he pleases me.”

He roused himself to a t.i.tanic effort against an oppression that was coming over him. He tried to get the thing down to a definite small case, an incident, an affair of considerations. ”But look here, you know,” he said. ”What precisely do you mean to do if you get him? You don't seriously intend to keep up the game to that extent. You don't mean--positively, in our terrestrial fas.h.i.+on, you know--to marry him?”

The Sea Lady laughed at his recovery of the practical tone. ”Well, why not?” she asked.

”And go about in a bath chair, and-- No, that's not it. What _is_ it?”

He looked up into her eyes, and it was like looking into deep water.

Down in that deep there stirred impalpable things. She smiled at him.

”No!” she said, ”I sha'n't marry him and go about in a bath chair. And grow old as all earthly women must. (It's the dust, I think, and the dryness of the air, and the way you begin and end.) You burn too fast, you flare and sink and die. This life of yours!--the illnesses and the growing old! When the skin wears shabby, and the light is out of the hair, and the teeth-- Not even for love would I face it. No.... But then you know--” Her voice sank to a low whisper. ”_There are better dreams._”

”What dreams?” rebelled Melville. ”What do you mean? What are you? What do you mean by coming into this life--you who pretend to be a woman--and whispering, whispering ... to us who are in it, to us who have no escape.”

”But there is an escape,” said the Sea Lady.

”How?”

”For some there is an escape. When the whole life rushes to a moment--”

And then she stopped. Now there is clearly no sense in this sentence to my mind, even from a lady of an essentially imaginary sort, who comes out of the sea. How can a whole life rush to a moment? But whatever it was she really did say, there is no doubt she left it half unsaid.

He glanced up at her abrupt pause, and she was looking at the house.

”Do ... ris! Do ... ris! Are you there?” It was Mrs. Bunting's voice floating athwart the lawn, the voice of the ascendant present, of invincibly sensible things. The world grew real again to Melville. He seemed to wake up, to start back from some delusive trance that crept upon him.

He looked at the Sea Lady as if he were already incredulous of the things they had said, as if he had been asleep and dreamed the talk.

Some light seemed to go out, some fancy faded. His eye rested upon the inscription, ”Flamps, Bath Chair Proprietor,” just visible under her arm.