Mr. Bunting was out fishing. He was not fond of fishing, but he was in many respects an exceptionally resolute little man, and he had taken to fishing every day in the afternoon after luncheon in order to break himself of what Mrs. Bunting called his “ridiculous habit” of getting sea-sick whenever he went out in a boat. He said that if fishing from a boat with pieces of mussels for bait after luncheon would not break the habit nothing would, and certainly it seemed at times as if it were going to break everything that was in him. But the habit escaped. This, however, is a digression.
These two, I say, were sitting in the ample shade under the evergreen oak, and Melville, I imagine, was in those fine faintly patterned flannels that in the year 1899 combined correctness with ease. He was no doubt looking at the shaded face of the Sea Lady, framed in a frame of sunlit yellow-green lawn and black-green ilex leaves—at least so my impulse for verisimilitude conceives it—and she at first was pensive and downcast that afternoon and afterwards she was interested and looked into his eyes. Either she must have suggested that he might smoke or else he asked. Anyhow, his cigarettes were produced. She looked at them with an arrested gesture, and he hung for a moment, doubtful, on her gesture.
“I suppose you—” he said.
“I never learned.”
He glanced at Parker and then met the Sea Lady’s regard.
“It’s one of the things I came for,” she said.
He took the only course.
She accepted a cigarette and examined it thoughtfully. “Down there,” she said, “it’s just one of the things— You will understand we get nothing but saturated tobacco. Some of the mermen— There’s something they have picked up from the sailors. Quids, I think they call it. But that’s too horrid for words!”
She dismissed the unpleasant topic by a movement, and lapsed into thought.
My cousin clicked his match-box.
She had a momentary doubt and glanced towards the house. “Mrs. Bunting?” she asked. Several times, I understand, she asked the same thing.
“She wouldn’t mind—” said Melville, and stopped.
“She won’t think it improper,” he amplified, “if nobody else thinks it improper.”
“There’s nobody else,” said the Sea Lady, glancing at Parker, and my cousin lit the match.
My cousin has an indirect habit of mind. With all general and all personal things his desperation to get at them obliquely amounts almost to a passion; he could no more go straight to a crisis than a cat could to a stranger. He came off at a tangent now as he was sitting forward and scrutinising her first very creditable efforts to draw. “I just wonder,” he said, “exactly what it was you did come for.”
She smiled at him over a little jet of smoke. “Why, this,” she said.
“And hairdressing?”
“And dressing.”
“Am I doing it right?” asked the Sea Lady.
She smiled again after a momentary hesitation. “And all this sort of thing,” she said, as if she felt she had answered him perhaps a little below his deserts. Her gesture indicated the house and the lawn and—my cousin Melville wondered just exactly how much else.
“Am I doing it right?” asked the Sea Lady.
“Beautifully,” said my cousin with a faint sigh in his voice. “What do you think of it?”
“It was worth coming for,” said the Sea Lady, smiling into his eyes.
“But did you really just come——?”
She filled in his gap. “To see what life was like on land here?… Isn’t that enough?”
Melville’s cigarette had failed to light. He regarded its blighted career pensively.
“Life,” he said, “isn’t all—this sort of thing.”
“This sort of thing?”
“Sunlight. Cigarette smoking. Talk. Looking nice.”
“But it’s made up——”
“Not altogether.”
“For example?”
“Oh, you know.”
“What?”
“You know,” said Melville, and would not look at her.
“I decline to know,” she said after a little pause.
“Besides—” he said.
“Yes?”
“You told Mrs. Bunting—” It occurred to him that he was telling tales, but that scruple came too late.
“Well?”
“Something about a soul.”
She made no immediate answer. He looked up and her eyes were smiling. “Mr. Melville,” she said, innocently, “what is a soul?”
“Well,” said my cousin readily, and then paused for a space. “A soul,” said he, and knocked an imaginary ash from his extinct cigarette.
“A soul,” he repeated, and glanced at Parker.
“A soul, you know,” he said again, and looked at the Sea Lady with the air of a man who is handling a difficult matter with skilful care.
“Come to think of it,” he said, “it’s a rather complicated matter to explain——”
“To a being without one?”
“To any one,” said my cousin Melville, suddenly admitting his difficulty.
He meditated upon her eyes for a moment.
“Besides,” he said, “you know what a soul is perfectly well.”
“No,” she answered, “I don’t.”
“You know as well as I do.”
“Ah! that may be different.”
“You came to get a soul.”
“Perhaps I don’t want one. Why—if one hasn’t one——?”
“Ah, there!” And my cousin shrugged his shoulders. “But really you know— It’s just the generality of it that makes it hard to define.”
“Everybody has a soul?”
“Every one.”
“Except me?”
“I’m not certain of that.”
“Mrs. Bunting?”
“Certainly.”
“And Mr. Bunting?”
“Every one.”
“Has Miss Glendower?”
“Lots.”
The Sea Lady mused. She went off at a tangent abruptly.
“Mr. Melville,” she said, “what is a union of souls?”
Melville flicked his extinct cigarette suddenly into an elbow shape and then threw it away. The phrase may have awakened some reminiscence. “It’s an extra,” he said. “It’s a sort of flourish.… And sometimes it’s like leaving cards by footmen—a substitute for the real presence.”
There came a gap. He remained downcast, trying to find a way towards whatever it was that was in his mind to say. Conceivably, he did not clearly know what that might be until he came to it. The Sea Lady abandoned an attempt to understand him in favour of a more urgent topic.
“Do you think Miss Glendower and Mr. Chatteris——?”
Melville looked up at her. He noticed she had hung on the latter name. “Decidedly,” he said. “It’s just what they would do.”
Then he spoke again. “Chatteris?” he said.
“Yes,” said she.
“I thought so,” said Melville.
The Sea Lady regarded him gravely. They scrutinised each other with an unprecedented intimacy. Melville was suddenly direct. It was a discovery that it seemed he ought to have made all along. He felt quite unaccountably bitter; he spoke with a twitch of the mouth and his voice had a note of accusation. “You want to talk about him.”
She nodded—still grave.
“Well, I don’t.” He changed his note. “But I will if you wish it.”
“I thought you would.”
“Oh, you know,” said Melville, discovering his extinct cigarette was within reach of a vindictive heel.
She said nothing.
“Well?” said Melville.
“I saw him first,” she apologised, “some years ago.”
“Where?”
“In the South Seas—near Tonga.”
“And that is really what you came for?”
This time her manner was convincing. She admitted, “Yes.”
Melville was carefully impartial. “He’s sightly,” he admitted, “and well-built and a decent chap—a decent chap. But I don’t see why you——”
He went off at a tangent. “He didn’t see you——?”
“Oh, no.”
Melville’s pose and tone suggested a mind of extreme liberality. “I don’t see why you came,” he said. “Nor what you mean to do. You see”—with an air of noting a trifling but valid obstacle—“there’s Miss Glendower.”
“Is there?” she said.
“Well, isn’t there?”
“That’s just it,” she said.
“And besides after all, you know, why should you——?”
“I admit it’s unreasonable,” she said. “But why reason about it? It’s a matter of the imagination——”
“For him?”
“How should I know how it takes him? That is what I want to know.”
Melville looked her in the eyes again. “You know, you’re not playing fair,” he said.
“To her?”
“To any one.”
“Why?”
“Because you are immortal—and unincumbered. Because you can do everything you want to do—and we cannot. I don’t know why we cannot, but we cannot. Here we are, with our short lives and our little souls to save, or lose, fussing for our little concerns. And you, out of the elements, come and beckon——”
“The elements have their rights,” she said. And then: “The elements are the elements, you know. That is what you forget.”
“Imagination?”
“Certainly. That’s the element. Those elements of your chemists——”
“Yes?”
“Are all imagination. There isn’t any other.” She went on: “And all the elements of your life, the life you imagine you are living, the little things you must do, the little cares, the extraordinary little duties, the day by day, the hypnotic limitations—all these things are a fancy that has taken hold of you too strongly for you to shake off. You daren’t, you mustn’t, you can’t. To us who watch you——”
“You watch us?”
“Oh, yes. We watch you, and sometimes we envy you. Not only for the dry air and the sunlight, and the shadows of trees, and the feeling of morning, and the pleasantness of many such things, but because your lives begin and end—because you look towards an end.”
She reverted to her former topic. “But you are so limited, so tied! The little time you have, you use so poorly. You begin and you end, and all the time between it is as if you were enchanted; you are afraid to do this that would be delightful to do, you must do that, though you know all the time it is stupid and disagreeable. Just think of the things—even the little things—you mustn’t do. Up there on the Leas in this hot weather all the people are sitting in stuffy ugly clothes—ever so much too much clothes, hot tight boots, you know, when they have the most lovely pink feet, some of them—we see,—and they are all with little to talk about and nothing to look at, and bound not to do all sorts of natural things and bound to do all sorts of preposterous things. Why are they bound? Why are they letting life slip by them? Just as if they wouldn’t all of them presently be dead! Suppose you were to go up there in a bathing dress and a white cotton hat——”
“It wouldn’t be proper!” cried Melville.
“Why not?”