CHAPTER VIII.

MYSTERY OF THE SEA.

Dr. Plantet would have landed at once upon Maui, and warned them, but Arturo dissuaded him.

“It is not necessary, father. That has been going on down there for weeks. There is no hurry that way. Besides--” He checked himself suddenly.

“What?” his father demanded. “Arturo, if there is anything more--”

But Arturo remained silent. He had conveyed the impression of having other vital knowledge; I think now, looking back upon it, that he did it knowingly, cleverly bending his father to his further purpose.

“What?” demanded Dr. Plantet again.

“Father, won’t you trust me? I brought you here and showed you what I could--”

I said: “Arturo, look here, you’re not telling us that you want us to keep this thing secret? That would be dastardly!”

He turned those solemn dark eyes upon me. He was only eighteen, this lad; but at that moment he seemed older than I.

“No, Jeff, of course not. When you--when we get back, father can discuss it fully with the authorities. If you like, father, you might try now to call Washington. Tell them, briefly, that with your own eyes you have confirmed your theories--your worst fears. Tell them that there may be warfare such as this world has never imagined. But I hardly think I would specifically name this threat against Maui. It might cause--if news of it leaked out--a panic in the Hawaiians. And from its remoteness to Europe it might make those people over there less earnest in preparing. No good in that, and besides--”

He paused, and then as though having decided to finish, he added:

“Besides, I am not--we are not, Nereid and I--altogether sure that the main threat is against Maui. There may be other localities.”

“Well, what do you want us to do?” asked Dr. Plantet.

He told us then, with a simple directness. Run the Dolphin to ten degrees one minute five seconds N., one hundred and fifty-eight degrees four minutes eighteen seconds E. I looked it up on the chart. Open sea. A point in Micronesia, not far from the island where Arturo had found Nereid--some fifty miles to the northeast of it. We had to go there, lie on the surface for a night, and wait.

Arturo, for all his quiet force, turned to sudden pleading. “Oh, father dear, won’t you trust me? Please believe Nereid and I are thinking only to do what is best!”

I am very glad--since fate seemed determined to give Arturo his way--that Dr. Plantet yielded in the fashion he did. He put his hands on Arturo’s slim shoulders; he gazed into the lad’s earnest, flushed face. There was a somber wistfulness there. I think Dr. Plantet must have seen it. He suddenly enfolded his son in his strong arms.

“Your world already owes you a great deal for what you have done, Arturo. I do believe in you.”

We ran the Dolphin to the position Arturo gave us. A depth was here evidently far beyond our reaching. But we did not try to investigate it. We lay awash, at sundown, idly waiting as Arturo directed.

A tenseness had fallen over all of us on the Dolphin. It showed clearly stamped on Arturo and Nereid. It communicated to us. Polly and Arturo were much together. Polly says that never had she felt him so gentle, so affectionate. Or so quietly obdurate in his secretiveness.

Dr. Plantet and I discussed the situation. There would be much to do when we got ashore.

But we both realized that our discussion was premature. Arturo still had something to show us. It might change everything--add new factors to make all our present plans useless.

* * * * *

We lay awash that night on the surface of the empty sea. There was a brilliant moon coming up near midnight in the east. It painted the sea with a running stream of silver.

Toward midnight it clouded over with a leaden sky, and the wind fell. A hush was on everything; an oppressive, ominous hush. The surface turned glassy, grimly brooding.

Arturo gave his orders. This was a rendezvous--something he said, some vague suggestion he dropped, made us realize it was that. He had for a day been puttering with something in his cabin. He brought it up at midnight--a small but brilliant hand-light which was part of the Dolphin’s equipment. He showed it to me.

“Look, Jeff--what I did!” He had pasted a yellow strip of mica with a queer design on it, across the flash light face. He smiled like a boy triumphant over a great boy-secret. “Don’t ask me, Jeff--you’ll see presently. To-night--or it may be we’ll have to wait, so don’t be disappointed.”

He sent us below, and sat on the dark deck alone with Nereid. Waiting. He said he would like to let us stay up there with him--but our presence there would interfere. There could be two on the deck, no more.

We three were in the instrument room. Dr. Plantet, unknown to Arturo, had the under-sea telescope ready; if anything appeared, he would snap it on. We had loaded the torpedo tube also. It was possible that Arturo might be tricked. This might be some enemy for whom we were thus trustfully waiting.

We were tense, ready as we could be, for what might come. Occasionally Dr. Plantet would send me on tiptoe in the darkness to the turret-top to observe in secret Arturo and Nereid upon the deck.

* * * * *

It was dark out there on the deck. The two figures sat some distance from me as I crouched in the turret doorway. But I could see their outlines fairly clearly--Arturo sitting close to her, sometimes whispering.

She stood up. She evidently saw something. My heart began pounding. Whatever it was, it was hidden from my position. Arturo was on his feet beside her. She gestured--I could see her slim white arm gesturing. I saw him raise the flash light, and send its narrow, penetrating yellow beam steadily out over the water. That device he had cut in the yellow face of it--something, some one out there must be seeing that--and recognizing it, as Nereid? I thought so.

There was a space, while Arturo held the light steadily level. Then Nereid said something to him. He snapped off the light. They stood waiting. A minute? Ten minutes? I do not know. I heard nothing; saw nothing save those two motionless, tense figures standing there by the Dolphin’s low rail. Boy and girl, so slim, so frail, so youthful, both of them. They stood, so close together that her long wild tresses seemed almost enfolding him.

I recall that I was about to go below and tell Dr. Plantet and Polly of this signal I had seen. A movement of Nereid stiffened me. She drew apart from Arturo. The Dolphin’s rail was lower than her waist. She seemed poised; her arms went up; she went in a graceful arc, over and head downward into the sea.

[Illustration: _Nereid went in a graceful arc into the sea._]

I was stiffened for just an instant. Why, what was this? Arturo moved. He put his foot upon the rail. For a breath, he seemed to hesitate. Was he executing his compact with Nereid? I think so. But perhaps, there at the last as he hesitated, he was fighting with the lure. His foot was on the rail. He plunged. There was a little splash as he struck the water!

I waited. One has not long to wait for a swimmer to come up. I called: “Arturo! Arturo!” I crossed the narrow deck, rushed to the bow--to the stern. I called frantically: “Arturo!”

My running footsteps, my frantic voice brought Dr. Plantet and Polly. She called wildly: “Arturo! Arturo dear--”

We hurried below, and too late now, we plunged the Dolphin.

But there was nothing. Down to our limit of two thousand fathoms there was nothing but the dark, turgid mystery of the sea.

* * * * *

I come now to that curiously inactive year during which, had we not seen what with our own eyes we saw, all the strange events I have so far described might have been the figment of our imagination. The public knew nothing of the details, of course. And even the governments and scientists before whom we laid our report were dubious of our veracity.

But there were solid facts. Ships had been lost. The oceans did recede some twenty fathoms. Solid facts, not to be denied. And a mermaid had been seen. But that, as a matter of science, was a jest; and there was almost nothing left save what we said we saw. And with the going of Arturo, the solid facts seemed to come to an end.

The year passed, and the winter and spring of 1991 slid by. The oceans were down twenty fathoms, but no more. The disturbance of nature seemed at an end. There was earthquake and volcanic activity, but nothing unduly severe--nothing more than many other years of the past had shown.

Twenty fathoms of water were gone, it seemed permanently, from the oceans. The confusion in the world’s affairs which it created was quickly clearing; we humans adjust ourselves so readily to new conditions! Ships soon were again sailing the surface, and none were attacked.

There was no attack upon Maui, or elsewhere. In November, 1990, we took the Dolphin back to Maui. The delay was because Dr. Plantet had been stricken ill. I would not have thought that an emotion, even for a son, could have stricken him. But it did. He denied it was that; but it was.

They had sent armed surface vessels to the Maui area, while Dr. Plantet lay ill. They bombed the depths; they searched with lights; they bombed with hovering planes. There was no response from below.

Then at last, with other scientists, we took the Dolphin cautiously down there. We were a long time finding that exact caldron depression to which Arturo and Nereid had led us. But we found it--and as though to deny us all credibility, nothing was there. This enemy had withdrawn. I recalled that Arturo had said several things which hinted something of the kind.

We fruitlessly searched with a long, deep voyage of the Dolphin. And we thought of Nereid’s island--Arturo’s plane, and Nereid’s globe which had been left there. We found the plane untouched, lying there, mute, pathetic witness to the fact that there ever had been an Arturo. But Nereid’s globe was gone.

We found the little cave with its pool where they swam together, and laughed together, and planned this thing which had taken him from us. A few little trinkets of his were lying there; his violin was there--and a strangely fashioned shell comb which undoubtedly was hers. That was all.

Dr. Plantet seldom mentioned Arturo. But often, with Polly, I pondered the past; and there was much that my idle fancy could conjure. I saw Arturo as a gentle hero, sacrificing himself for his world. I read into the memories of those days the idea that Arturo went away with Nereid because he knew he might be able to check these dire, threatening things. Often I would say to Polly, “It’s a fact that the oceans have stopped falling--and the menace has withdrawn--”

The public so quickly forgets! No one seemed greatly worried now over the mysterious things that had occurred in 1990. No one ever seemed to think that they might occur again. Yet to me, the menace always hung over us.

Arturo had said, “This may only be an experimental attack--the main warfare may be fought on land.” Those wild desert lands which now we were calling the sea. They were so soon to be added to our habitable world, with our enemy infernal lurking in them!

* * * * *

My ship was put back on its regular run in January, 1991. It was, to me, an eerie thing to be traversing again these waters of the Pacific, flowing through them on our prosaic commercial rounds as if nothing strange had ever happened down here. For the first few voyages my nerves were taut; I found myself with sharpened fancy and straining vision watching the passing green depths, as though every moment I might see a globe with Nereid’s face. Or Arturo, in some strange guise, waiting somewhere down here to meet our passing. I sometimes feared that a beam of light which was not light, but something else might leap up from beneath and seize us, as the Dolphin that time had been seized.

The feeling after a few voyages wore off. Nothing happened; I began to tell myself that nothing ever would happen.

I was doing well financially. Our line was prospering. In March, 1991, the directors voluntarily raised my pay. I began to think then of Polly as my wife. I had never spoke definitely of love to her, yet there was between us an understanding--unvoiced, but I am sure that she felt as I did.

Much of my shore leave was spent with Polly and her father. He was planning a long voyage of the Dolphin, to chart the ocean deeps in the interest of science. I wondered if it could be that there was still in his mind some thought of finding a trace of Arturo. I think so; but he disguised it.

He planned to have me navigate the Dolphin. It necessitated my giving up my post; and I hesitated. I wanted to marry Polly; and to be working for her father, dependent upon him for my income, was not wholly to my liking.

The dreams and nightmares which were to have so strange an influence upon my future, began about this time and for five months they troubled me. I had always been, or at least I thought so, a person above the influence of idle dreams. There was nothing morbid about me. Dreams might sway a fanciful lad like Arturo, but not me.

But I was mistaken. These dreams--I had them, fragments of them nearly every time I slept--gradually laid their mark upon me. I did not speak of love to Polly; I avoided decision with Dr. Plantet over the voyage of the Dolphin. I was scarcely aware of it at first, but I became moody, silent, almost morose.

Polly noticed it. Once, with a very gentle tenderness which I was in no mood to appreciate, she tried to question me. I recall that I checked her sharply.

The dreams began unobtrusively. I remember the first one: I awoke with the feeling that I had been somewhere beneath the sea. The memory of a turgid vision of a watery waste, with things floating. The feeling of it oppressed me all day.

There was another. Young Tad Megan, a friend of Arturo’s and mine who had been lost on a surface freighter in one of the disasters of April, 1990, stood in the dream before me. His face was very white; his slowly waving arms seemed floating in water; there was green-black water all around him.

Fragments like these. Recurring dreams, always of water--until, as my morbidness grew, I began to hate my calling that took me under the sea--almost grew to fear it.

There were dreams of music. Sometimes I thought that I had heard Arturo playing. Often, as I awoke, I fancied I had seen his face, smiling at me with a gentle wistfulness. Again, I saw myself, bloated, drifting in a turgid liquid darkness.

It is fearful to be obsessed throughout all one’s waking hours, with the lingering memory of nightmares. I began to fear them--fearing the time when I would have to go to sleep and dream them again. I became nervous; my digestion suffered.

In June, when a grave blunder of mine nearly brought disaster upon us, my superior told me bluntly that my work was unsatisfactory, getting more so all the time. He did not know why, and I did not tell him. But I fought with the dreams--fought to thrust them as nonsense out of my waking thoughts.

I could not--did not dare--propose marriage to Polly. A sense of personal disaster was upon me. I mistrusted everything. My health--I feared I would lose it, and lose my post. And there was another reason why now I began to avoid Polly. A recurring fragment of dream: A dim cathedral vault of green water with chimes ringing through it. A girl, like Nereid, with tawny floating hair and eyes with the sea in them, calling me, luring me--and always I would try to answer, and would wake up, calling my answer to her.

An obsession. I began to feel, even when awake and about my daily duties, the presence of the girl--her eyes upon me, her white arm and hand, flushed with the tint of coral, reaching out to touch me. And against all the reason of my sober waking senses, I knew that in my heart I longed for her. A disloyalty to Polly? I felt it so, and it made me increasingly morbid.

* * * * *

Of such threads was woven the fabric of those last days of Arturo. I know it now. The lure was on me then, as it had been then upon him. But though I did not realize it, there was a strange but solid basis of science to all this. More than mere dreams; more than mere disturbed fancy.

I said nothing to Polly, or to Dr. Plantet, or any one. Like Arturo, I carried it alone. Tad Megan, drowned over a year now, was more and more in my thoughts--as though something were forcing him there. Even more than the alluring girl, the vision of him often came to me as I slept.

I had liked him tremendously. A short stocky fellow with a shock of upstanding red hair. A laughing freckled face usually red with sunburn. A jolly companion, who saw a joke in everything--all of life with its grim struggle to be taken as a joke. And now he was dead, lost in one of those disasters last year which it seemed now would never be explained.

There was a dream in which I saw Tad very clearly. He was laughing; he seemed alive and healthy and laughing, and beckoning me to come and join him. Then water came rushing at us; his face went solemn; it went white and solemn and faded away as I struggled to get to him.

Thus I was, in August ’91, nothing of the Jeff Grant I had been the year before. A moody fellow now, churlish and sullen, almost estranged from Polly and her father. I liked best to be alone. And so the momentous night of August 15 found me, with my shore leave beginning, seeking solitary diversion in New York City. I had been to a theater. I was returning to my hotel along one of the upper pedestrian levels.

Broadway was thronged. It was just about midnight. Down on the street level the vehicles went by in a stream; above them, to the sides, the moving sidewalks swung past with all their seats packed. The green-white trellised vacuums cast their glare upon the busy scene--half a million people hurrying off to their homes, or to eating and dancing places for further midnight diversion.

Gay scenes of shifting, scurrying movement and tumultuous sound. At the crossings the directors roared their orders with electrical voices; loud speakers shouted their advertisements from every point of vantage; huge news-mirrors showed images of the current world-happenings, flashing on and off with advertisements interspersed.

A gay scene; but I was in no mood to join with it. That sense of inward depression, chronic with me now, sat heavily upon my spirit. I walked the crowded upper level alone, following its outer balcony rail. It was a rainy, blustery night. The street-roof overhead was wet with the falling sheets of rain; I could see the water through the glassite, running off in rivulets. At a crossing, where in the side streets there was no roof, the rain beat down in a torrent upon glistening pavements.

The valley of the Hudson was off there, only a few blocks away--frowning Palisades; an empty cañon where last year the stately river had been. The muddy slope down to its center was caking solid now under the sun of these hot summer days. With the tide-water gone, there was only a narrow, swift-flowing fresh-water stream down there at the bottom. The side-slopes were already being built upon.

I stood there for a moment gazing moodily. And suddenly it seemed that Tad Megan was there with me; something of him--standing at my elbow. Plucking at me? I turned swiftly. A man and woman had brushed against me as they passed.

It was eerie, nerve-racking. I tried to shake it off--this something, following me always. Ahead, another half block up Broadway, there was a sudden, tumultuous movement in the crowd. Something unusual. I could see the people rushing along one of the middle levels; voices rose in shouts. The excitement communicated everywhere.

In one of the moving pavement halts a thousand people suddenly leaped off to join the running throng. The stream of vehicles down at the bottom of the street was disorganized; the director down there was frantically roaring, but his orders were lost--the vehicles, fully half of them, were turning into the inclines to come up.

I gripped a hurrying man. “What is it?”

“Announcement. Government--official. To the public, at twelve ten.”

“It’s twelve five now. Where is it to be?”

“Park Circle 80. Government mirror there. Let go of me, you grounder! What’s the matter with you?”

I had been clinging to him; unreasoningly trembling. What, indeed, was the matter with me? I did not know. I tried to steady myself. I smiled. “I’ll go with--”

But the man jerked from me and hurried away. Park Circle 80 was only a few blocks north. The crowd was all converging there. I followed, mingling with it. There must have been ten thousand people thronging that upper circle. They jammed all its tiers; around its outer diameter the vehicles stood parked in rows. I was a few minutes late. The overhead lights had dimmed. A silence had fallen.

The fifty-foot pyramid mirror, with its hexagon sides to face every portion of the circle, was luminous. Moving black letters were on it, for all to read.

Government official, midnight, August 15. Atlantic Coast, average tide at low, off five-sixths fathom--

I stood gaping, reading. Tide bulletins! A series of statements of the low tides of the day at different points along the North American sea coasts.

The crowd grew restless; a director’s broadcasted voice roared: “Silence! It means that the oceans are going down--faster than last year.”

The crowd swayed, shouted, and then grew still; awed, frightened into silence. All over the city, at all the circles, I knew that scenes like this were transpiring.

The menace has come again! Stand by for government orders to the public--

The menace had come again!