MOONSHINE TRIUMPHANT¹ I
Just precisely² 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 rendering³, but it is, he says, closely after the manner of their talk, the gist⁴ was that, and things of that sort were said. And when he left Chatteris, he fully⁵ believed that the final and conclusive⁶ thing was said. And then he says it came into his head that, apart from and[286] outside this settlement, there still remained a tangible⁷ 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 Métropole and had parted with a firm handclasp outside the glare of the big doorway⁸. 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 passed back along the Leas, as I have said. His inconclusive interrogations elicited⁹ at the utmost that Lummidge’s Private and Family Hotel is[287] singularly like any other hotel of its class. Its windows tell no secrets. And there Melville’s narrative¹⁰ ends.
 
With that my circumstantial 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, secondly¹¹, the hall-porter of Lummidge’s Private and Family Hotel.
 
The valet’s evidence is precise, but has an air of being irrelevant¹². 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 passage, is the whole of human life.
 
“More to do?” said Chatteris.[288]
 
“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 attitude 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 lethargic¹³ meditation¹⁴ gave way to a strange activity, to a sort of hysterical¹⁵ reaction against all his resolves and renunciations. His first action seems to me grotesque—and grotesquely¹⁶ pathetic. He went into his dressing-room, and in the morning “his clo’es,” said the valet, “was shied about as though ’e’d lost a ticket.” This poor worshipper of beauty and the dream shaved! He shaved and washed and he brushed his hair, and, his valet testifies, one of the brushes got “shied”[289] 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 deliberately¹⁷ and conscientiously¹⁸ have made himself quite “lovely,” as a schoolgirl would have put it.
 
And having capped his great “renunciation” by these proceedings¹⁹, he seems to have gone straight to Lummidge’s Private and Family Hotel and demanded to see the Sea Lady.
 
She had retired²⁰.
 
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.[290]
 
“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 frackass.”
 
“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 stagnant²¹ hour. He decided²² to try Parker again; he raised his voice.
 
The Sea Lady called to Parker from the inner room. There was an interval²³ of tension.
 
I gather that the Sea Lady put on a loose wrap, and the faithful Parker either carried her or sufficiently²⁴ helped her from her bedroom to the couch in the little sitting-room²⁵. In the meanwhile the hall-porter hovered²⁶ on the stairs, praying for[291] the manager—prayers that went unanswered—and Chatteris fumed²⁷ 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 fixed²⁸ smile, and so remained until he judged the effect on me was complete.
 
Parker, a little flushed, but resolutely²⁹ flattening³⁰ everything to the quality of the commonplace, emerged upon him suddenly. Miss Waters could see Mr. Chatteris for a few minutes. She was emphatic³¹ with the “Miss Waters,” the more[292] emphatic for all the insurgent³² stress of the goddess, protestingly emphatic. And Chatteris went up, white and resolved, to that smiling expectant presence. No one witnessed their meeting but Parker—assuredly Parker could not resist seeing that, but Parker is silent—Parker preserves a silence that rubies³³ could not break.
 
All I know, is this much from the porter:
 
“When I said she was up there and would see him,” he says, “the way he rooshed up was outrageous............