The Merman and the Figure-Head

by Clara F. Guernsey

Now, there was one curious thing about this family, and one which makes me think there was some truth in the legend of their descent from Gulnare and the King of Khorassan.

All the other merpeople have the greatest objection to human beings, and shun all inhabited coasts, seaport towns and ships. But every once in a while a member of this race would show the oddest fancy for the shore and a kind of longing after human society—a longing which of course they never could gratify, for they could not live out of the water, and if they had been able to desert the sea, the forked ends of their long tails would have been of no use on land.

A few years before the family left the English coast, a younger son had actually married a human girl who went back to her friends and deserted him on the shamefully false pretence that she wanted to go to church. The poor merman went out of his wits and died, and was ever afterward held up as an example to any of the younger ones who showed any signs of similar weakness. To care anything for human creatures is counted disgraceful in mer society, and the older members of the family for the most part felt it their duty to express the greatest possible animosity to the whole human race. The old professor of magic had once said that he would swim a hundred miles to see a shipwreck if he were only sure the people would all be drowned, but he was strongly suspected of having saved a drunken sailor who fell overboard from a Cape Cod schooner. The professor himself used to deny this story with great indignation, and say it was of a piece with the slanderous invention about his family’s connection with Gulnare of the sea and her misalliance.

His grandson, however, if the story was hinted at in his presence, would look grave and say that he had never supposed the story was true, but if it were, his grandfather had only obeyed the dictates of mermanity. This was a shocking speech in the ears of the merpeople. Our young merman, however, had distinguished himself in the war, and no one cared to quarrel with him. So they contented themselves with calling him “queer,” and saying that “oddity ran in the family.”

It was the summer vacation in the sea land. All the commencements in the mer colleges were just over. All the presidents of those institutions had made their speeches in languages dead and alive, and told all their classes what an enormous responsibility rested upon them, how they were bound to “go forward,” and “to conquer,” and to “build themselves up,” and to “develop themselves,” and be “leaders of their kind,” and, in short, do something in proportion to the expense bestowed on their education. This is a way they have in sea land. But naturally in the sea they take things cooler than we can on land, and you wouldn’t believe how very little difference the advent of all these expensively got up young mermen made in the water world if you had not been there to see. Now the old mer professor hadn’t had a very comfortable time. His class that year was rather a stupid one, and with all the pains he could take and all the “coaches” they could use they hadn’t passed a very good examination in magic. One young gentleman upon whom he had thought he could certainly depend being told to make himself invisible, which is a very difficult problem, had made a mistake, used the wrong formula, and by accident transformed the whole Board of Examiners, who were not expecting any such thing, into cuttle-fishes. There was dreadful confusion for a few minutes, for the student couldn’t remember how to turn them back again, and as the spell could not be undone by any one else, the members of the board got all tangled up together, while the professor, in an awful temper, was trying to teach the young man the right formula.

“And by accident transformed the whole board of examiners into cuttle-fishes.”

But they were all undone at last, only there was one immensely wealthy old merman who was never quite sure in his mind that he had got back his own proper curly fish’s tail, and not that of some other gentleman, so that all the rest of his life he was in a puzzle as to at least half his personal identity. This incident so vexed him that he did not give anything to the college funds, as he had fully intended. This circumstance and a few other accidents had so annoyed the professor that instead of going to the North Seas with his grandson he shut himself up in the house and began to write a book. The book was in opposition to a theory put forth by a learned merman in the Baltic Sea that human beings were undeveloped mermen. The professor, however, declared that they were no such thing, but simply undeveloped walruses. He began his first chapter by saying that, while he had the highest respect for the Baltic merman’s acquirements, intellect, penetration and general infallibility, he nevertheless felt himself obliged to declare that none but an idiot or a madman could come to the conclusion of the learned man aforesaid. He (the professor) wished to lay down his platform in the beginnings and state that he differed from the opinions of the learned author on this and all other conceivable points.

“You’d a good deal better go along with me, grandfather,” said the young merman, swimming into the room where the professor was sitting with his big books all about him. “Think how nice and cool it will be among the icebergs this hot weather. Hadn’t you better come?”

“I won’t,” said the old professor, snapping and switching his tail angrily round in the water, for the houses there are full of water, as ours are of air.