Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (22 page)

Mr. and Mrs. Palmer were of the party; the former, they knew from Sir John, had been a buccaneer in his youth, and so his general darkness of spirit was compounded on this occasion by a scorn for the inauthenticity of the theme dance. He looked at Elinor and Marianne slightly, shook his head gloomily, and merely nodded to Mrs. Jennings from the other side of the room. Marianne gave one glance round the apartment as she entered, lifting up the eye patch she had affected for the evening to assure herself that
he
was not there—and sat down, equally ill-disposed to receive or communicate pleasure, despite her warm affection for pirate slang and custom. After they had been assembled about an hour, Mr. Palmer sauntered towards the Miss Dashwoods to express his surprise on seeing them in town.

“The Island. Pestilent Isle,” said he curtly. “You are shut of it, then?”

“We are indeed, though our mother and youngest sister remain,” replied Elinor.

“Then pray for them,” he said darkly. “Pray for them.” And, providing no chance for Elinor to divine his meaning, Palmer turned on his boot heel and stalked away.

Never had Marianne been so unwilling to dance a jig in her life, as she was that evening, and never so much fatigued by the exercise. She complained of it as they returned to Berkeley Causeway.

“Aye, aye,” said Mrs. Jennings, “we know the reason of all that very well. If a certain person who shall be nameless, had been at the theme dance, you would have been a most sprightly pirate lass indeed. To say the truth, it was not very pretty of him not to give you the meeting when he was invited.”

“Invited!” cried Marianne

“So my daughter Middleton told me, for it seems Sir John met him somewhere this morning.” Marianne said no more, but looked exceedingly hurt. Impatient in this situation to be doing something that might
lead to her sister’s relief, Elinor resolved to write the next morning to her mother.

About the middle of the day, Mrs. Jennings went out by herself on business, and Elinor began her letter directly, while Marianne, too restless for employment, too anxious for conversation, walked from the front window to the back glass, listlessly tapping on the glass at a school of clusterfish—clustered, characteristically, outside. Elinor was very earnest in her application to her mother, relating all that had passed, her suspicions of Willoughby’s inconstancy, urging her by every plea of duty and affection to demand from Marianne an account of her real situation with respect to him.

Her letter was scarcely finished, when a rap foretold a visitor, and Colonel Brandon was announced. Marianne, who had seen him from the window, left the room before he entered it. He looked more than usually grave; his dark eyes were downcast, and his weird, squiddish protrusions lay like a dark, quivering cloud over his jowls. Though he expressed satisfaction at finding Miss Dashwood alone, as if he had something urgent to tell her, he sat for some time without saying a word. After a pause of several minutes, during which her impatience and the deep, mucousy workings of Brandon’s respiration conspired to drive Elinor to the point of distraction, their silence was broken—by his asking when he was to congratulate her on the acquisition of a brother. Elinor was not prepared for such a question, and was obliged to adopt the simple and common expedient of asking what he meant. All the tentacles in the world could not have hidden the insincerity of his smile as he replied, “Your sister’s engagement to Mr. Willoughby is very generally known?”

“It cannot be generally known,” returned Elinor, “for her own family do not know it.”

He looked surprised and said, “I beg your pardon, I am afraid my inquiry has been impertinent; but I had not supposed any secrecy intended, as they openly correspond, and their marriage is universally talked of.”

“How can that be? By whom can you have heard it mentioned?”

“By many—by some of whom you know nothing, by others with whom you are most intimate, Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Palmer, and the Middletons. But still I might not have believed it, for where the mind is perhaps rather unwilling to be convinced, it will always find something to support its doubts. But when the servant let me in today, and stepped past onto the gangplank to tie up the porpoise on which I arrived, I accidentally saw a letter in his hand, directed to Mr. Willoughby in your sister’s writing. Is everything finally settled? Is it impossible to—”

He stopped himself, and his fleshy face fingers twisted themselves into knots of awkwardness.

“Excuse me, Miss Dashwood. I believe I have been wrong in saying so much, but I hardly know what to do. Tell me that it is all absolutely resolved on, that any attempt, that in short concealment, if concealment be possible, is all that remains.”

These words, which conveyed to Elinor a direct avowal of his love for her sister, affected her very much. She was not immediately able to say anything, and even when her spirits were recovered, she debated for a short time, on the answer it would be most proper to give. The real state of things between Willoughby and her sister was so little known to herself, that in endeavouring to explain it, she might be as liable to say too much as too little. Yet she thought it most prudent and kind to say more than she really knew or believed.

She acknowledged, therefore, that though she had never been informed by themselves of the terms on which they stood with each other, of their mutual affection she had no doubt, and of their correspondence she was not astonished to hear.

He listened to her with silent attention, nodding sadly so as to cause his tentacle-mass to shake limply. On her ceasing to speak, Brandon rose directly from his seat, and said in a voice of emotion, “to your sister I wish all imaginable happiness; to Willoughby that he may endeavour to deserve her.” Then he took leave and went away.

Elinor derived no comfortable feelings from this conversation; she
was left, on the contrary, with a melancholy impression of Colonel Brandon’s unhappiness. From the window she saw him pause and stare for several long seconds into the canal; it seemed to Elinor that Brandon contemplated abandoning his steed and simply diving in and swimming away—as if in the moment of his heart’s defeat he had become more fish than man.

N
OTHING OCCURRED
during the next three or four days to make Elinor regret applying to her mother; for Willoughby neither came nor wrote. They were engaged about the end of that time to attend with Lady Middleton an event at Hydra-Z, more properly known as the Hydro-Zoological Laboratory and Exhibition Arcade. Admission to the spectacle was an enormous honour, one the Dashwoods could only enjoy through their connection with Sir and Lady Middleton. Hydra-Z was the very heart of the Station’s scientific facilities, where captured monsters were submitted to the most rigorous re-training and biological modification programs—and, when the results were satisfactory, brought before paying audiences to demonstrate how completely they had been made to do the will of man.

As Elinor understood the intention of tonight’s amusement, they would be seated with the rest of the guests in an amphitheatre, arrayed semi-circularly before a vast pool, and be treated to a command performance by a dozen giant, super-intelligent, domesticated lobsters.

For this spectacle, Marianne prepared wholly dispirited, careless of her appearance, and seeming equally indifferent whether she went or stayed; she listlessly adjusted her Float-Suit and selected a pair of opera glasses from Mrs. Jennings collection. She sat in the drawing-room till the
moment of Lady Middleton’s arrival, without once stirring from her seat, or altering her attitude, lost in her own thoughts, and insensible of her sister’s presence; and when at last they were told that Lady Middleton waited for them at the door, she started as if she had forgotten that anyone was expected.

They arrived in due time at Hydra-Z and were ushered to Amphitheatre Seven, where the spectacle was to unfold; they heard their names announced from one landing-place to another in an audible voice, and entered to find the whole pool, with surrounding seating area, splendidly lit up. They began to mingle in the crowd—the lobsters had not yet been led in, leaving time for other amusement until the performance began. Lady Middleton was able to organize a handful of strangers for a game of Karankrolla, by the sure method of not telling them exactly what it was; as Marianne was not in spirits for moving about, she and Elinor succeeded to the raked seating area, placing themselves at no great distance from the pool.

They had not remained in this manner long, before it was announced that the lobsters were to be brought in. Enthusiastic applause welling up from the crowd, all eyes turned to the pool, into which the twelve magnificent, genetically enhanced Nephropidae were swimming from a small side stream. Trotting parallel to them at the water’s edge was a handsome trainer in a bathing costume and cap, holding an elongated lobster-crop in one hand and waving with the other to the crowd.

It was then that Elinor perceived Willoughby, standing by the water’s edge within a few yards of them, in earnest conversation with a very fashionable looking young woman; startled, Elinor wondered at first if it was truly he, until she saw Monsieur Pierre, hopping gaily from one foot to another at Willoughby’s side. She soon caught his eye—Willoughby’s, not Monsieur Pierre’s—and he immediately bowed, but without attempting to speak to her or to approach Marianne, though he could not but see her; and then continued his discourse with the same lady. Elinor turned involuntarily to Marianne, to see whether it could be unobserved by her.
At that moment she first perceived him, and her whole countenance glowing with sudden delight, she would have moved towards him instantly, had not her sister caught hold of her.

The lobsters had now all swum into the pool, each one half again as big as a cow. Elinor recoiled instinctually from the creatures, but then watched with fascination as, under the trainer’s command, they began to swim slow, precise figure eights in the pool. Still holding Marianne by the shoulder, she raised her opera glasses. Their enormous size magnified the disturbing appearance of the crustaceans—the twin antennae extending from beneath the beady eyes; the ribbed, mottled-brown exoskeletons; the army of skittering pereiopod lining the torso; and of course the claws, each pair like a gigantic brown-black nutcracker, except razor-sharp where it clacked together. Like privates being drilled by a sergeant, these hideous creatures dipped in and out of the water as they swam, bobbing up and down, snapping their oversized claws in the air each time they surfaced.

Marianne could not be distracted, even by the elegant athletic turns of the lobsters. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “Why does he not look at me? Why cannot I speak to him?”

“Pray be composed,” cried Elinor, “and do not betray what you feel to everybody present. Perhaps he has not observed you yet.”

This, however, was more than she could believe herself; and to be composed at such a moment was not only beyond the reach of Marianne, it was beyond her wish. She sat in an agony of impatience which affected every feature. In the pool, the trainer shouted a rough command, and the lobsters were in an instant up on their caudal furca in the shallow water, claws extended upwards in a comically servile posture like so many hunting dogs begging for scrap. The lobsters waited at bay for their next command, their antennae wavering tremulously in the air, as the trainer produced from a small valise a croquet ball and hurled it up towards them. The first of the lobsters in the line reached out a claw and deftly crushed the croquet ball to powder. The crowd cheered its approval.

Next the trainer produced a billiard ball, and tossed it before the next lobster in the line, who dispatched it with similar ease. Elinor saw that Willoughby applauded heartily along with his fellow spectators; could he be so at ease?

Now from the valise came the skull of some animal—Elinor thought it was a sheep. After this grim object had been tossed, and destroyed with a swift claw-snap from another of the monster lobsters, Willoughby at last turned round, and regarded the sisters; Marianne started up, and pronouncing his name in a tone of affection, held out her hand to him. He approached, and addressing himself rather to Elinor than Marianne, as if wishing to avoid her eye, and determined not to observe her attitude, inquired in a hurried manner after Mrs. Dashwood, and asked how long they had been in-Station. Elinor was robbed of all presence of mind by such an address, and was unable to say a word. As her mind tried in vain to alight on an appropriate response, she saw over Willoughby’s shoulder that one of the lobsters had, for some reason, broken the neat line and resumed its natural position, belly in the water.

Marianne was too focused on Willoughby’s strange behaviour to note this aberration in the program; her feelings were instantly expressed. Her face was crimsoned over, and she exclaimed, in a voice of the greatest emotion, “Good God! Willoughby, what is the meaning of this? Have you not received my letters? Will you not shake hands with me?”

Poolside, the scowling trainer set down the enormous ripe casaba melon he was about to throw to the lobsters and jumped in to corral his errant charge.

Willoughby, meanwhile, could not now avoid the insisted-upon handshake, but Marianne’s touch seemed painful to him, and he held her hand only for a moment. During all this time he was evidently struggling for composure. Elinor watched his countenance and saw its expression becoming more tranquil. After a moment’s pause, he spoke with calmness.

“I did myself the honour of calling in Berkeley Causeway last Tuesday, and very much regretted that I was not fortunate enough to find
yourselves and Mrs. Jennings at home. My hermit-crab card was not lost, I hope: It’s the one with the shovels formed into a
W
.”

“But have you not received my notes?” cried Marianne in the wildest anxiety. “Here is some mistake I am sure—some dreadful mistake. What can be the meaning of it? Tell me, Willoughby; for heaven’s sake tell me, what is the matter?”

Before her tormentor could proffer an answer, all conversation was stilled by a most terrible and unnatural sound emerging from the direction of the pool, and echoing through the vast room. It was a sound, thought Elinor as she clutched her ears against it, like the squeal of a rat amplified a thousandfold and merged with the screams of a frightened child.