The Sea Lady

The Sea Lady looked at her with sudden frankness. “And think how wonderful all this must seem to me!” she remarked.

But Adeline’s imagination was aroused for the moment and she was not to be put aside by the Sea Lady’s terrestrial impressions. She pierced – for a moment or so – the ladylike serenity, the assumption of a terrestrial fashion of mind that was imposing so successfully upon Mrs. Bunting. “It must be,” she said, “the strangest world.” And she stopped invitingly…

She could not go beyond that and the Sea Lady would not help her.

There was a pause, a silent eager search for topics. Apropos of the Niphetos roses on the table they talked of flowers and Miss Glendower ventured: “You have your anemones too! How beautiful they must be amidst the rocks!”

And the Sea Lady said they were very pretty – especially the cultivated sorts…

“And the fishes,” said Mrs. Bunting. “How wonderful it must be to see the fishes!”

“Some of them,” volunteered the Sea Lady, “will come and feed out of one’s hand.”

Mrs. Bunting made a little coo of approval. She was reminded of chrysanthemum shows and the outside of the Royal Academy exhibition and she was one of those people to whom only the familiar is really satisfying. She had a momentary vision of the abyss as a sort of diverticulum of Piccadilly and the Temple, a place unexpectedly rational and comfortable. There was a kink for a time about a little matter of illumination, but it recurred to Mrs. Bunting only long after. The Sea Lady had turned from Miss Glendower’s interrogative gravity of expression to the sunlight.

“The sunlight seems so golden here,” said the Sea Lady. “Is it always golden?”

“You have that beautiful greenery-blue shimmer I suppose,” said Miss Glendower, “that one catches sometimes ever so faintly in aquaria – ”

“One lives deeper than that,” said the Sea Lady. “Everything is phosphorescent, you know, a mile or so down, and it’s like – I hardly know. As towns look at night – only brighter. Like piers and things like that.”

“Really!” said Mrs. Bunting, with the Strand after the theatres in her head. “Quite bright?”

“Oh, quite,” said the Sea Lady.

“But – ” struggled Adeline, “is it never put out?”

“It’s so different,” said the Sea Lady.

“That’s why it is so interesting,” said Adeline.

“There are no nights and days, you know. No time nor anything of that sort.”

“Now that’s very queer,” said Mrs. Bunting with Miss Glendower’s teacup in her hand – they were both drinking quite a lot of tea absent-mindedly, in their interest in the Sea Lady. “But how do you tell when it’s Sunday?”

“We don’t – ” began the Sea Lady. “At least not exactly – ” And then – “Of course one hears the beautiful hymns that are sung on the passenger ships.”

“Of course!” said Mrs. Bunting, having sung so in her youth and quite forgetting something elusive that she had previously seemed to catch.

But afterwards there came a glimpse of some more serious divergence – a glimpse merely. Miss Glendower hazarded a supposition that the sea people also had their Problems, and then it would seem the natural earnestness of her disposition overcame her proper attitude of ladylike superficiality and she began to ask questions. There can be no doubt that the Sea Lady was evasive, and Miss Glendower, perceiving that she had been a trifle urgent, tried to cover her error by expressing a general impression.

“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