Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (21 page)

“Is your sister ill?” said he, his flagellum wavering worriedly beneath his nose.

Elinor answered in some distress that she was, and then talked of head-aches, low spirits, and a mild case of diver’s disease stemming from their Descent that morning.

He said no more on the subject, and began directly to speak of his pleasure at seeing them in-Station, making the usual inquiries about the peril of their journey, and the friends they had left behind. Elinor told him of the lantern-beasts; he recalled a similar anecdote from his service in the East Indies, except it was not lantern-beasts that threatened the boat, but piranhas; and rather than carefully weave their way through the swarm of creatures, the crew had satiated them by throwing
overboard a shackled would-be deserter.

In this calm kind of way, with very little interest on either side, they continued to talk, both of them out of spirits, and the thoughts of both engaged elsewhere. Elinor wished very much to ask whether Willoughby were in town, but she was afraid of giving Brandon pain by any enquiry after his rival; and at length, by way of saying something, she asked if he had been at Sub-Marine Station Beta ever since she had seen him last. “Yes,” he replied, with some embarrassment, “almost ever since; I have been once or twice at Delaford for a few days, but it has never been in my power to return to the Devonshire coast.”

This, and the manner in which it was said, immediately brought back to her remembrance all the circumstances of his quitting that place. She was fearful that her question had implied much more curiosity on the subject than she had ever felt.

Mrs. Jennings soon came in. “Oh! Colonel,” said she, with her usual noisy cheerfulness, “I am monstrous glad to see you—”

Elinor gasped audibly at this inauspicious word choice, Brandon looked at his hands, and even the usually imperturbable Mrs. Jennings blanched at her poor choice of words.

“Ah yes, sorry, I am
very
glad to see you—I didn’t mean
monstrous
glad, as in—not to imply that you are—sorry—beg your pardon, but I have been forced to look about me a little, and settle my matters; for it is a long while since I have been at home. But pray, Colonel, how came you to conjure out that I should be in the Sub-Station today?”

“I had the pleasure of hearing it at Mr. Palmer’s, where I have been dining.”

“You did! How does Charlotte do? I warrant you she is swollen as a puffer-fish by this time.”

“Mrs. Palmer appeared quite well, and I am commissioned to tell you, that you will certainly see her to-morrow.”

“Ay, to be sure, I thought as much. Well, Colonel, I have brought two young ladies with me. You see but one of them now, but there is
another somewhere. Your friend, Miss Marianne, too—which you will not be sorry to hear. I do not know what you and Mr. Willoughby will do between you about her. Aye, it is a fine thing to be young and handsome—” Mrs. Jennings blanched again. “Or, well—young, anyway. But Colonel, where have you been to since we parted? And how does your business go on? Do my eyes deceive me, or do you have slightly fewer of those things on your face than previously? No? Ah, well. Come, come, let’s have no secrets among friends!”

He replied with his customary mildness to all her inquiries, but without satisfying her in any. Elinor now began to slice off chunks of gelatinous scone loaf to be eaten with their tea, and Marianne was obliged to appear again.

After her entrance, Colonel Brandon became more thoughtful and silent than he had been before, absentmindedly stroking his squigglers and looking blankly about the room; Mrs. Jennings could not prevail on him to stay long. No other visitor appeared that evening, and the ladies were unanimous in agreeing to go early to bed. For some time, however, a school of clownfish organized themselves to batter against the glass of the Dome for an hour and a half, between midnight and one thirty, making sleep impossible; once they ceased in their efforts, all slept pleasantly.

Marianne rose the next morning with recovered spirits and happy looks. The disappointment of the evening before seemed forgotten in the expectation of what was to happen that day. They had not long finished their toast-and-beans-flavoured gelatin cubes before Mrs. Palmer’s gondola was glimpsed being tied up at the dock, and in a few minutes she came laughing into the room, so delighted to see them all.

“Mr. Palmer will be so happy to see you,” said she; “What do you think he said when he heard of your coming with Mamma? I forget what it was now, but it was something so droll—touching, I think, upon the uselessness of social visits when one considers the ultimate darkness that awaits us all, or something of that nature. Droll indeed!”

After an hour or two spent in what her mother called comfortable
chat, it was proposed by Mrs. Palmer that they should all accompany her to the Retail Embankment, to which Mrs. Jennings and Elinor readily consented, the latter having heard of the dazzling array of specialty items on offer in-Station, from embossed fans made from dorsal fins to crystallized serpent eyes fashioned into earrings; and Marianne, though declining it at first, was induced to go likewise.

It was late in the morning before they returned home; and no sooner had they entered the docking than Marianne flew eagerly upstairs, and when Elinor followed, she found her turning from the table with a sorrowful countenance, which declared that no Willoughby had been there.

“Has no letter been left here since we went out?” said she to the footman who then entered with the parcels. She was answered in the negative. “Are you quite sure of it?” she replied. “No one has swum up and left something? No bottle has floated to the door, a note carefully folded within? Are you certain that no servant, no porter has left any letter or note?”

The man replied that none had.

“How very odd!” said she, in a low and disappointed voice, as she turned away to the observation glass.

“How odd, indeed!” repeated Elinor within herself, regarding her sister with uneasiness. “If she had not known him to be at the Sub-Marine Station she would not have written to him, as she did; she would have written to Combe Magna; and if he is docked here, how odd that he should neither come nor write!” Elinor recalled rumours of ultra-secret government laboratories in-Station; supposedly men were experimented upon in various chilling ways, with the goal of creating improvements in human anatomy that would allow our bedeviled species decisive advantage over the chordate races. She wondered whether it were possible that Willoughby had submitted to such an experiment, and had his brain exchanged with that of a tortoise or was similarly indisposed? And yet to make such a sacrifice seemed unlike Willoughby—but what did they truly know of him!

Marianne passed that evening restlessly; she sometimes endeavoured for a few minutes to read, having acquired at a fashionable Retail Embankment book shop a new volume titled
The Near-Drowning, Near-Starvation, and Subsequent Rescue of the Spanish Seaman Alphonso James
; but the book was soon thrown aside, and she returned to the more interesting employment of walking backwards and forwards across the room, pausing for a moment whenever she came to the window, in hopes of distinguishing the long-expected rap. Instead all she saw was the passing gondolas of strangers; or, if looking out the room’s glass rear wall, the teeming hordes of slithering and swimming things, all as desperate to get into the Station as was Marianne to meet again with her lamented friend.

“R
EPORTS FROM THE SURFACE-LANDS
are of sunny skies,” said Mrs. Jennings, employing the phrase common in-Station to refer to the world outside, “If the open weather continues, Sir John will not like setting off from the archipelago next week. On fine days, he likes to prowl his grounds, trolling the freshwater ponds for serpents and strangling them barehanded. He will not want to lose a day’s pleasure.”

“That is true,” cried Marianne with happy surprise. Walking to the back glass as she spoke, she watched with cheerful fascination as a cutlassfish speared a carp and swallowed it whole. “I had not thought of that. This weather will keep many monster hunters in the country, and treasure hunters, too.”

It was a lucky recollection, all her good spirits were restored by it. “It sounds like they are having charming weather, indeed,” she continued, as she sat down at the table to stir a packet of tea flavouring into a glass
of water. “How much they must enjoy it! But it cannot be expected to last long. Frosts will soon set in, and in all probability with severity—nay, perhaps it may freeze tonight!”

“At any rate,” said Elinor, wishing to prevent Mrs. Jennings from seeing her sister’s thoughts as clearly as she did, “I dare say we shall have Sir John and Lady Middleton in-Station by the end of next week.”

“Aye, my dear, I’ll warrant you we do. My daughter always has her own way; except, of course, when it comes to achieving what she most desires: to flee Sir John’s household, never to see him or this country, again.”

The morning was chiefly spent in leaving decorated hermit-crab shells—used as calling cards by fashionable Sub-Station residents—at the houses of Mrs. Jennings’s acquaintance to inform them of her being in Station; and Marianne was all the time busy imagining that, through the slightest shifts in atmospheric pressure in the great encased Dome of the Sub-Station, she could divine the temperature in the Surface-Lands. Time and again, Elinor gently reminded Marianne that the weather in Sub-Marine Station Beta was created by the workings of cloud-engines and temperature-stabilizers, all powered by Newcomen steam-devices, and bearing no relation to the warmth or cold of the Surface-Lands. But Marianne would not be deterred from her amateur aerology.

“Don’t you find it more pressurized than it was in the morning, Elinor? There seems to me a very decided difference in pressure; my ear drums are continually popping, such that I have to go like this with my face to unclog them.”

Elinor was alternately diverted and pained; but Marianne persevered, and saw every night in the shadows of submarines passing overhead, and every morning in the subtlest alterations in her inner ear, the certain symptoms of approaching frost in the country.

The Miss Dashwoods had no reason to be dissatisfied with Mrs. Jennings’s style of living, and her behaviour to themselves was invariably kind. Colonel Brandon, who had a general invitation to the docking station, was with them almost every day. He came to look at Marianne and
talk to Elinor, who often derived more satisfaction from conversing with him than from any other daily occurrence. At the same time she saw with much concern his continued regard for her sister. She noted that his appendages at times seemed to stiffen a bit when he chanced to glance upon Marianne, as if excess blood were flowing into them. It grieved her to see the earnestness with which he often watched Marianne, and discomfited her to see the aforementioned tentacle-stiffness; his spirits were certainly worse than when at Deadwind.

About a week after their arrival, it became certain that Willoughby was also arrived. His hermit-crab shell calling card, marked with the distinctive
W
formed from crossed treasure shovels, was on the table when they came in after a brief pleasure cruise of the canals one morning.

“Good God!” cried Marianne. “He has been here while we were out!” Elinor, rejoiced to be assured of his being at Sub-Marine Station Beta, now ventured to say, “Depend upon it, he will call again to-morrow.” But Marianne seemed hardly to hear her, and on Mrs. Jennings’s entrance, escaped with the precious shell.

This event, while it raised the spirits of Elinor, restored to Marianne all her former agitation. From this moment her mind was never quiet; the expectation of seeing him every hour of the day, made her unfit for anything. Nor could she be persuaded to accompany them, the next morning, on their planned excursion to Mr. Pennywhistle’s Aqua-Museo-Quarium, a petting zoo and showplace designed for the diversion of children and unmarried women. There some of the gentler and more thoroughly domesticated sea-beasts, such as snails, dolphins, and pollywogs, could be marveled at and even ridden upon.

Elinor’s thoughts were full of what might be passing in Berkeley Causeway during their absence, so much so that out of inattention she let her hand slip off the reins and was nipped by a pony-sized sea snail upon which she had been riding; the beast’s white-jacketed handler apologised profusely, and was heard to mutter darkly to the errant gastropod that “butter could be warmed for you yet.”

A moment’s glance at her sister when they returned from the Aqua-Museo-Quarium was enough to inform Elinor that Willoughby had paid no second visit there. A note was just then brought in, and laid on the table.

“For me!” cried Marianne, stepping hastily forward.

“No, ma’am, for my mistress.”

But Marianne, not convinced, took it instantly up.

“It is indeed for Mrs. Jennings! How provoking! I cannot read a word of it!” (Which was precisely true—the note was written in Mrs. Jennings’s native tongue, which used neither vowels nor spaces between the words.)

“You are expecting a letter, then?” said Elinor.

“Yes, a little—not much.”

Mrs. Jennings soon appeared, and the note being given her, she read it aloud.

“
Hghgljtxlxthrhralkxvjlklklqrdl
,” she read quickly, and then, after clearing her throat, explained. The letter was from Lady Middleton, announcing their Descension into the Station the night before, and requesting the company of her mother and cousins the following evening. The invitation was accepted; but when the hour of appointment drew near, Elinor had some difficulty in persuading her sister to go, for still she had seen nothing of Willoughby; and she was unwilling to run the risk of his calling again in her absence.

Elinor found, when the evening was over, that disposition is not materially altered by a change of abode, for although scarcely settled in town, Sir John had contrived to collect around him, nearly twenty young people, and to amuse them with a pirate-themed ball, gentlemen of fortune being very much in vogue that season. This was an affair, however, of which Lady Middleton did not approve. In the country, an unpremeditated thematic dance was very allowable; but in the Sub-Station, where the reputation of elegance was more important and less easily attained, it was risking too much for the gratification of a few girls, to have it known that Lady Middleton had given a small dance of
eight or nine couples, with two fiddlers and a small assortment of appetizer-flavoured paste cakes.