“I can’t see it,” she said, with a gesture that asked for sympathy. “One wants to see it, one wants to be it. One needs to be born a mer-child.”
“A mer-child?” asked the Sea Lady.
“Yes— Don’t you call your little ones——?”
“What little ones?” asked the Sea Lady.
She regarded them for a moment with a frank wonder, the undying wonder of the Immortals at that perpetual decay and death and replacement which is the gist of human life. Then at the expression of their faces she seemed to recollect. “Of course,” she said, and then with a transition that made pursuit difficult, she agreed with Adeline. “It is different,” she said. “It is wonderful. One feels so alike, you know, and so different. That’s just where it is so wonderful. Do I look—? And yet you know I have never had my hair up, nor worn a dressing gown before today.”
“What do you wear?” asked Miss Glendower. “Very charming things, I suppose.”
“It’s a different costume altogether,” said the Sea Lady, brushing away a crumb.
Just for a moment Mrs. Bunting regarded her visitor fixedly. She had, I fancy, in that moment, an indistinct, imperfect glimpse of pagan possibilities. But there, you know, was the Sea Lady in her wrapper, so palpably a lady, with her pretty hair brought up to date and such a frank innocence in her eyes, that Mrs. Bunting’s suspicions vanished as they came.
(But I am not so sure of Adeline.)
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE EPISODE OF THE VARIOUS JOURNALISTS
I
The remarkable thing is that the Buntings really carried out the programme Mrs. Bunting laid down. For a time at least they positively succeeded in converting the Sea Lady into a credible human invalid, in spite of the galaxy of witnesses to the lady’s landing and in spite of the severe internal dissensions that presently broke out. In spite, moreover, of the fact that one of the maids—they found out which only long after—told the whole story under vows to her very superior young man who told it next Sunday to a rising journalist who was sitting about on the Leas maturing a descriptive article. The rising journalist was incredulous. But he went about enquiring. In the end he thought it good enough to go upon. He found in several quarters a vague but sufficient rumour of a something; for the maid’s young man was a conversationalist when he had anything to say.
Finally the rising journalist went and sounded the people on the two chief Folkestone papers and found the thing had just got to them. They were inclined to pretend they hadn’t heard of it, after the fashion of local papers when confronted by the abnormal, but the atmosphere of enterprise that surrounded the rising journalist woke them up. He perceived he had done so and that he had no time to lose. So while they engaged in inventing representatives to enquire, he went off and telephoned to the Daily Gunfire and the New Paper. When they answered he was positive and earnest. He staked his reputation—the reputation of a rising journalist!
“I swear there’s something up,” he said. “Get in first—that’s all.”
He had some reputation, I say—and he had staked it. The Daily Gunfire was sceptical but precise, and the New Paper sprang a headline “A Mermaid at last!”
You might well have thought the thing was out after that, but it wasn’t. There are things one doesn’t believe even if they are printed in a halfpenny paper. To find the reporters hammering at their doors, so to speak, and fended off only for a time by a proposal that they should call again; to see their incredible secret glaringly in print, did indeed for a moment seem a hopeless exposure to both the Buntings and the Sea Lady. Already they could see the story spreading, could imagine the imminent rush of intimate enquiries, the tripod strides of a multitude of cameras, the crowds watching the windows, the horrors of a great publicity. All the Buntings and Mabel were aghast, simply aghast. Adeline was not so much aghast as excessively annoyed at this imminent and, so far as she was concerned, absolutely irrelevant publicity. “They will never dare—” she said, and “Consider how it affects Harry!” and at the earliest opportunity she retired to her own room. The others, with a certain disregard of her offence, sat around the Sea Lady’s couch—she had scarcely touched her breakfast—and canvassed the coming terror.
“They will put our photographs in the papers,” said the elder Miss Bunting.
“Well, they won’t put mine in,” said her sister. “It’s horrid. I shall go right off now and have it taken again.”
“They’ll interview the Ded!”
“No, no,” said Mr. Bunting terrified. “Your mother——”
“It’s your place, my dear,” said Mrs. Bunting.
“But the Ded—” said Fred.
“I couldn’t,” said Mr. Bunting.
“Well, some one’ll have to tell ’em anyhow,” said Mrs. Bunting. “You know, they will——”
“But it isn’t at all what I wanted,” wailed the Sea Lady, with the Daily Gunfire in her hand. “Can’t it be stopped?”
“You don’t know our journalists,” said Fred.
The tact of my cousin Melville saved the situation. He had dabbled in journalism and talked with literary fellows like myself. And literary fellows like myself are apt at times to be very free and outspoken about the press. He heard of the Buntings’ shrinking terror of publicity as soon as he arrived, a perfect clamour—an almost exultant clamour indeed, of shrinking terror, and he caught the Sea Lady’s eye and took his line there and then.
“It’s not an occasion for sticking at trifles, Mrs. Bunting,” he said. “But I think we can save the situation all the same. You’re too hopeless. We must put our foot down at once; that’s all. Let me see these reporter fellows and write to the London dailies. I think I can take a line that will settle them.”
“Eh?” said Fred.
“I can take a line that will stop it, trust me.”
“What, altogether?”
“Altogether.”
“How?” said Fred and Mrs. Bunting. “You’re not going to bribe them!”
“Bribe!” said Mr. Bunting. “We’re not in France. You can’t bribe a British paper.”
(A sort of subdued cheer went around from the assembled Buntings.)
“You leave it to me,” said Melville, in his element.
And with earnestly expressed but not very confident wishes for his success, they did.
He managed the thing admirably.
“What’s this about a mermaid?” he demanded of the local journalists when they returned. They travelled together for company, being, so to speak, emergency journalists, compositors in their milder moments, and unaccustomed to these higher aspects of journalism. “What’s this about a mermaid?” repeated my cousin, while they waived precedence dumbly one to another.
“I believe some one’s been letting you in,” said my cousin Melville. “Just imagine!—a mermaid!”
“That’s what we thought,” said the younger of the two emergency journalists. “We knew it was some sort of hoax, you know. Only the New Paper giving it a headline——”