The Sea Lady Part 30

Melville produced an elaborate conceit. "If there is no Venus Anadyomene," he said, "there is Michael and his Sword."

"The stern angel in armour! But then he had a good palpable dragon to slash and not his own desires. And our way nowadays is to do a deal with the dragons somehow, raise the minimum wage and get a better housing for the working cla.s.ses by hook or by crook."

Melville does not think that was a fair treatment of his suggestion.

"No," said Chatteris, "I've no doubt about the choice. I'm going to fall in--with the species; I'm going to take my place in the ranks in that great battle for the future which is the meaning of life. I want a moral cold bath and I mean to take one. This lax dalliance with dreams and desires must end. I will make a time table for my hours and a rule for my life, I will entangle my honour in controversies, I will give myself to service, as a man should do. Clean-handed work, struggle, and performance."

"And there is Miss Glendower, you know."

"Rather!" said Chatteris, with a faint touch of insincerity. "Tall and straight-eyed and capable. By Jove! if there's to be no Venus Anadyomene, at any rate there will be a Pallas Athene. It is she who plays the reconciler."

And then he said these words: "It won't be so bad, you know."

Melville restrained a movement of impatience, he tells me, at that.

Then Chatteris, he says, broke into a sort of speech. "The case is tried," he said, "the judgment has been given. I am that I am. I've been through it all and worked it out. I am a man and I must go a man's way.

There is Desire, the light and guide of the world, a beacon on a headland blazing out. Let it burn! Let it burn! The road runs near it and by it--and past.... I've made my choice. I've got to be a man, I've got to live a man and die a man and carry the burden of my cla.s.s and time. There it is! I've had the dream, but you see I keep hold of reason. Here, with the flame burning, I renounce it. I make my choice.... Renunciation! Always--renunciation! That is life for all of us. We have desires, only to deny them, senses that we all must starve.

We can live only as a part of ourselves. Why should _I_ be exempt. For me, she is evil. For me she is death.... Only why have I seen her face?

Why have I heard her voice?..."

VI

They walked out of the shadows and up a long sloping path until Sandgate, as a little line of lights, came into view below. Presently they came out upon the brow and walked together (the band playing with a remote and sweetening indistinctness far away behind them) towards the cliff at the end. They stood for a little while in silence looking down.

Melville made a guess at his companion's thoughts.

"Why not come down to-night?" he asked.

"On a night like this!" Chatteris turned about suddenly and regarded the moonlight and the sea. He stood quite still for a s.p.a.ce, and that cold white radiance gave an illusory strength and decision to his face.

"No," he said at last, and the word was almost a sigh.

"Go down to the girl below there. End the thing. She will be there, thinking of you----"

"No," said Chatteris, "no."

"It's not ten yet," Melville tried again.

Chatteris thought. "No," he answered, "not to-night. To-morrow, in the light of everyday.

"I want a good, gray, honest day," he said, "with a south-west wind....

These still, soft nights! How can you expect me to do anything of that sort to-night?"

And then he murmured as if he found the word a satisfying word to repeat, "Renunciation."

"By Jove!" he said with the most astonis.h.i.+ng transition, "but this is a night out of fairyland! Look at the lights of those windows below there and then up--up into this enormous blue of sky. And there, as if it were fainting with moonlight--s.h.i.+nes one star."

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

MOONs.h.i.+NE TRIUMPHANT

I

Just precisely what happened after that has been the most impossible thing to disinter. I have given all the things that Melville remembered were said, I have linked them into a conversation and checked them by my cousin's afterthoughts, and finally I have read the whole thing over to him. It is of course no verbatim rendering, but it is, he says, closely after the manner of their talk, the gist was that, and things of that sort were said. And when he left Chatteris, he fully believed that the final and conclusive thing was said. And then he says it came into his head that, apart from and outside this settlement, there still remained a tangible reality, capable of action, the Sea Lady. What was she going to do? The thought toppled him back into a web of perplexities again. It carried him back into a state of inconclusive interrogation past Lummidge's Hotel.

The two men had gone back to the Metropole and had parted with a firm handclasp outside the glare of the big doorway. Chatteris went straight in, Melville fancies, but he is not sure. I understand Melville had some private thinking to do on his own account, and I conceive him walking away in a state of profound preoccupation. Afterwards the fact that the Sea Lady was not to be abolished by renunciations, cropped up in his mind, and he pa.s.sed back along the Leas, as I have said. His inconclusive interrogations elicited at the utmost that Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel is singularly like any other hotel of its cla.s.s. Its windows tell no secrets. And there Melville's narrative ends.

With that my circ.u.mstantial record necessarily comes to an end also.

There are sources, of course, and glimpses. Parker refuses, unhappily--as I explained. The chief of these sources are, first, Gooch, the valet employed by Chatteris; and, secondly, the hall-porter of Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel.

The valet's evidence is precise, but has an air of being irrelevant. He witnesses that at a quarter past eleven he went up to ask Chatteris if there was anything more to do that night, and found him seated in an arm-chair before the open window, with his chin upon his hands, staring at nothing--which, indeed, as Schopenhauer observes in his crowning pa.s.sage, is the whole of human life.

"More to do?" said Chatteris.

"Yessir," said the valet.

"Nothing," said Chatteris, "absolutely nothing." And the valet, finding this answer quite satisfactory, wished him goodnight and departed.

Probably Chatteris remained in this att.i.tude for a considerable time--half an hour, perhaps, or more. Slowly, it would seem, his mood underwent a change. At some definite moment it must have been that his lethargic meditation gave way to a strange activity, to a sort of hysterical reaction against all his resolves and renunciations. His first action seems to me grotesque--and grotesquely pathetic. He went into his dressing-room, and in the morning "his clo'es," said the valet, "was s.h.i.+ed about as though 'e'd lost a ticket." This poor wors.h.i.+pper of beauty and the dream shaved! He shaved and washed and he brushed his hair, and, his valet testifies, one of the brushes got "s.h.i.+ed" behind the bed. Even this throwing about of brushes seems to me to have done little or nothing to palliate his poor human preoccupation with the toilette. He changed his gray flannels--which suited him very well--for his white ones, which suited him extremely. He must deliberately and conscientiously have made himself quite "lovely," as a schoolgirl would have put it.

And having capped his great "renunciation" by these proceedings, he seems to have gone straight to Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel and demanded to see the Sea Lady.

She had retired.

This came from Parker, and was delivered in a chilling manner by the hall-porter.

Chatteris swore at the hall-porter. "Tell her I'm here," he said.

"She's retired," said the hall-porter with official severity.

"Will you tell her I'm here?" said Chatteris, suddenly white.

"What name, sir?" said the hall-porter, in order, as he explains, "to avoid a fracka.s.s."

"Chatteris. Tell her I must see her now. Do you hear, _now_?"

The hall-porter went to Parker, and came half-way back. He wished to goodness he was not a hall-porter. The manager had gone out--it was a stagnant hour. He decided to try Parker again; he raised his voice.

The Sea Lady called to Parker from the inner room. There was an interval of tension.

I gather that the Sea Lady put on a loose wrap, and the faithful Parker either carried her or sufficiently helped her from her bedroom to the couch in the little sitting-room. In the meanwhile the hall-porter hovered on the stairs, praying for the manager--prayers that went unanswered--and Chatteris fumed below. Then we have a glimpse of the Sea Lady.

"I see her just in the crack of the door," said the porter, "as that maid of hers opened it. She was raised up on her hands, and turned so towards the door. Looking exactly like this----"

And the hall-porter, who has an Irish type of face, a short nose, long upper lip, and all the rest of it, and who has also neglected his dentist, projected his face suddenly, opened his eyes very wide, and slowly curved his mouth into a fixed smile, and so remained until he judged the effect on me was complete.