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That gentle pastime of donning an armor of steel and going out before breakfast to thrust home a sword or lance through an enemy similarly equipped, indulged In by our best little knights of old, is childish pursuit and pales into insignificance beside that of his modern brother, the knight of the deep water.
His incasement is of rubber and canvas, and he wears a helmet of metal such as the ancient Lancelot could never have staggered along under. His shoes are of iron and brass and lead; he weights his body heavily, and goes down to do mortal combat with the dangers of lack of air, unusual pressure, entanglement of wreckage and all other perils of limb and life found beneath the surface of all well-regulated seas and rivers.
His must be a courage and a quietness of nerve that make his earlier-day prototype look like a correct imitation of the real thing. For at least the knight-errant had air and freedom of body, and light in plenty and action. The knight of the rubber armor works in darkness, exploring in an element foreign and unfriendly to life and limb, and he not only suspends his life by the proverbial thread, but must rest his assurance for the very air he breathes in the keeping of the patient men above, men who slowly, ceaselessly turn the wheels of the air pump.
What think you, then, of a girl, a mere slip of 18-year-old womanhood, who has adopted the strenuous calling of the deep-sea diver for her life's work? That is exactly what Marie De Rock, a Portland girl, has done. It all came about because Marie happened to be a girl instead of a boy. Father Fritz De Rock, Holland Dutch In spite of his French sounding name, was philosophical, if disappointed. "I'll make a diver out of her. anyway, when she gets big enough," he told his wife when she bemoaned the fact that they had no son to carry on the father's profession.
And when the little Marie grew big enough and strong enough, she became a pupil under her father's tutelage, and that is a tutelage that comes from 22 years' experience in deep-sea diving around Astoria and river diving in the Columbia and Willamette.
The girl diver is a graduate of St. Patrick's School, an excellent pianist; she makes most of her clothes, is a dandy housekeeper and devotes a bit of every day to serious reading. All this I learned later on, in a tour of the houseboat, where she lives with her parents, at the foot of Twenty-second Street. She showed me her room, a typical "girl's room."
Marie made many preparations for her dive, which was made from a scow, and it didn't take as long to do it as it requires to get all harnessed into a modern gown. First Marie clothed herself in heavy socks and underwear of flannel, all well secured to prevent slipping. A fat round pad that resembled a canvas doughnut was slipped over her curly pate. This pad takes some of the weight of the helmet from her shoulders. Then she wriggled her slim young body into a heavy suit of rubber and canvas, made like a pair of night clothes worn by very small boys who kick the covers off at night.
Rubber cuffs fit closely at the wrists and to make assurance doubly sure a pair of rubber bands were slipped, braceletlike, over her wrists. Father and Mother De Rock were her valets. They chattered and worked rapidly, fastening straps, bolts, screws and clamps. An inner collar and a breastplate of copper were fastened with clamps to the rubber garment. Then the shoes, great clumsy things of leather, with soles of brass and lead, and each weighing 20 pounds, were drawn on over the rubber socks.
Next a belt of brass and lead, a pretty little trifle that tips the scales at exactly 90 pounds, was strapped about Marie's waist. In carrying the shoes and belt alone Marie doubled her own weight, 130 pounds. The helmet was the last of the apparatus to go on. Before it was adjusted, Marie telegraphed a message with her eyes and a gesture of patting her really lovely brown hair. Mother De Rock, with her wisdom born of women, stopped the proceedings to run into the cabin and return with a soft,
lacy cap of the variety known as boudoir. This she fitted over Marie's curls, "so they wont get all mussed," she explained.
Before adjusting the helmet, a cumbersome dome-shaped head covering of copper, the valves and telephones were tested. The helmet is attached to the pump with rubber tube, which is protected by canvas and wire. It is roomy, this helmet, and has a face plate and a valve through which superfluous air escapes into the water.
Pete and Jake, the attendants, started to pump the instant the helmet was clamped on. It was a cruel weight, and once it was adjusted Marie did not delay her descent. Her father and an assistant half carried, half dragged her to the side of the scow, where a ladder led down into the water. They placed her with her face to the ladder and slowly she climbed down it. Then while we all watched in tense silence she slipped gently into the cold, dim, greenish, unknown under-water world.
Mrs. De Rock stood leaning over the scow's side, with the telephone receiver strapped to her ear and the transmitter glued to her mouth. "Hello, hello Is that you, Marie? Yes this is mamma hello how are you hello hello," the mother voice kept calling.
I watched her face as she conversed with Marie now going down rapidly as the attendants let out the line.
"Ah, Marie, she Is very brave," said the mother with that natural pride pardonable in mothers whose offspring do things out of the ordinary, "but, sometimes, I am not afraid, but I want her to be careful." Then it was that just mother love and fear for her one ewe lamb was writ large In every note of her voice.
A swirl of little bubbles on the water surface driven there by the escaping air in Marie's helmet located the diver to those watching above. "Suppose her telephone should get out of order," breathed a cheery optimist. Quickly the father replied, "She is supplied with a life line, and she can signal us, and we can draw her to the surface with it if she got helpless for any reason."
Before the advent of the telephone, Mr. De Rock explained, divers had to depend entirely upon jerks of the lifeline for communication with the surface, and upon signs to each other when two or more were working together under water and wished to communicate.
Later, when Marie had divested herself of her diver's garments and sat in the cozy little living room of her houseboat home, she talked easily and entertainlngly of her work. "At first thought," she said, "it doesn't seem such a difficult thing, this going down under water and breathing air sent in from a pump by a tube. But the physical drawbacks are great, and the mental ones are, I believe, even larger.
"For every ten feet I descend I sustain an added pressure of four and a half pounds over every square inch of my body. However, the weight I wear on my shoulders and the heavy leads on my feet make considerably less inroads on my strength while I am under the water. In fact if I didn't have them on I'd be more apt to come to the surface than stay down. But even If my weight is made less by the surrounding water, that same water clogs my efforts and resists motion."
"Are you going into it as a profession?" I asked her.
"Yes. I am." she replied. "There are lots of uses for divers. The water works in big cities employ them, so do dock builders, wrecking companies, bridge and construction companies; the under river tunneling makes a demand for their services, the Navy employs many, and every battleship has at least two highly trained divers.
"Of course I couldn't be in the hire of the Navy or a battleship, but I just mention these to show you in how many places a diver can be used. They are called upon for the most varied kind of work. My father has rescued drowned bodies, recovered cargo out of sunken vessels and has looked for treasure. The most I have ever done is to find some lost articles of jewelry. It is really plying pretty much all the land trades, only you do it under water."
"What do you see under the waters," I asked Marie. Her blue eyes got big and bright "Oh. I see all sorts of fish, and when I reach the bottom of the river there's tangled weeds and rocks against which objects have lodged. Sometimes the objects, especially the fish, seem twice as large as they really are. The first time I went down a little harmless fish looked as terrifying to me as a shark would now. I can't describe my sensations under water.
"No," she confessed. "I can't, because they are indescribable. As I sink in the water the daylight seems to merge into a sort of twilight. The first thing that strikes my consciousness is that my suit seems lighter in weight. Next I realize that the water has settled down and tucked me in all around like a coverlet. I breathe just as freely except for a slight oppression, as if I were above water.
"There really is no disagreeable sensation. I descend slowly, and swallow as I go, otherwise I might bleed at my nose or ears, or become unsconscious. I come up even more slowly and for the same reason."
When the dangers of diving were broached, she smiled. "Oh, yes, of course, it has dangers, but for that matter so has everything else. For instance, any interruption of my air supply means death. My helmet Is provided with a check valve which prevents water entering if the tube should be cut or broken, but the air in the helmet would last but a few minutes if the supply were cut off.
"Another danger is that of fainting. In that case I'd be in desperate straits, but the man handling the line can 'feel' if anything is wrong, and would haul me up at once. In a case like that you can see that the slender connecting link of the telephone more than means everything."
Marie is not in the least impressed by the merely romantic side of the life. She wants to be a diver because it's good and lucrative work. "The apparatus is expensive," she averred, "and the risk is great, but it has more than one recommendation as a profession. It requires very little time and it pays well. It develops quiet bravery and coolness as well as skill, and these are traits few women possess."
When I was bidding Marie goodbye, I asked her If she'd traveled much.
"Oh, yes," chimed in Mrs. De Rock. "Marie has been to Astoria and to Salem, and to Tacoma."
"And to Europe twice," said Marie, gently.
"Oh. yes." said her mother, "papa and Marie and me, we go to Europe twice to see our old homes. I didn't call that
traveling."