Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (29 page)

Almost everything that
was
said proceeded from Elinor, who was obliged to volunteer all the information about her mother’s health, their coming to town, etc.—all things Edward ought to have inquired about, but never did. In the resulting silence, the drowning servant pounded violently against the Dome, forming his mouth into the words
HELP ME
and clawing at the glass.

Elinor then determined, under pretence of fetching Marianne, to leave the others by themselves; and she really did it, and
that
in the handsomest manner,
for she loitered away several minutes on the landing-place before she went to her sister. When that was once done, however, it was time for the raptures of Edward to cease; for Marianne’s joy hurried her into the drawing-room immediately. Her pleasure in seeing him was like every other of her feelings, strong in itself, and strongly spoken. She met him with a hand that would be taken, and a voice that expressed the affection of a sister. “Dear Edward!” she cried. “This is a moment of great happiness! This would almost make amends for everything! Oh my God, there is a man out there—a drowning man!” Elinor leveled her sister with a corrective expression, to warn her from excessive enthusiasm regarding the presence of Edward, or as to the fate of the filtration-unit attendant. A gigantic and grotesquely toothsome anglerfish was swimming rapidly towards the latter, it’s photophore angled upwards like a spotlight; seeing the fish, the man turned back to the glass wall, eyes bulging, pleading wordlessly for rescue.

Edward tried to return Marianne’s kindness as it deserved, but before such witnesses he dared not say half what he really felt. Again they all sat down, and for a moment or two all were silent; while Marianne was looking with the most speaking tenderness, sometimes at Edward and sometimes at Elinor, regretting only that their delight in each other should be checked by Lucy’s unwelcome presence.

The anglerfish closed its hundreds of razor-like teeth on the man’s lower half, splitting him messily in two.

Edward was the first to speak, and it was to notice Marianne’s altered looks, and express his fear of her not finding the Sub-Station agreeable.

“Oh, don’t think of me!” she replied with spirited earnestness. The filtration-man’s upper body floated upwards, as his legs disappeared in ragged hunks into the gullet of the anglerfish. “Elinor is well, you see. That must be enough for us both.”

This remark was not calculated to make Edward or Elinor more easy, nor to conciliate the good will of Lucy, who looked up at Marianne with no very benignant expression.

“Do you like the Sub-Station?” said Edward, willing to say anything that might introduce another subject.

“Not at all. I expected much pleasure in it, but I have found none. The sight of you, Edward, is the only comfort it has afforded; and thank Heaven! You are what you always were!”

Outside the Dome, enough blood was left in the man’s upper portion for him to remain conscious, and he watched in horror as his lower portion was chewed to pieces by the great beast. Marianne paused— and no one spoke. The anglerfish finished the legs and began its assault on the remaining portion of the filtration attendant. The ocean fogged with blood.

“I think, Elinor,” she presently added, “we must employ Edward to take care of us in our return to Barton Cottage. In a week or two, I suppose, we shall be going; and, I trust, Edward will not be very unwilling to accept the charge.”

Poor Edward muttered something, but what it was, nobody knew— it may have been to the effect of, “Anglerfish certainly have a lot of teeth.” But Marianne, who saw his agitation, was perfectly satisfied, and soon talked of something else. “We spent such a day, Edward, in Harley Piscina yesterday! So dull, so wretchedly dull! But I have much to say to you on that head, which cannot be said now.”

And with this admirable discretion did she defer the assurance of her finding their mutual relatives more disagreeable than ever, and of her being particularly disgusted with his mother, till they were more in private.

“But why were you not there, Edward? Why did you not come?”

“I was engaged elsewhere.”

“Engaged! What was that, when such friends were to be met?”

“Perhaps, Miss Marianne,” cried Lucy, eager to take some revenge on her, “you think young men never stand upon engagements, if they have no mind to keep them, little as well as great.”

Elinor was very angry, but Marianne seemed entirely insensible of the sting. The water-tank servant was all the more insensible, and would
remain so forever, as the anglerfish swallowed his head in two great gulps. At this, Edward gasped and hid his eyes behind his hand.

“I am very sure that only conscience kept Edward from Harley Piscina,” Marianne calmly replied to Lucy’s slight. “And I really believe he
has
the most delicate conscience in the world; the most scrupulous in performing every engagement, however minute, and however it may make against his interest or pleasure. He is the most fearful of giving pain, of wounding expectation, and the most incapable of being selfish, of anybody I ever saw. Edward, it is so, and I will say it.” Winding up her speech, she turned and looked at the observation glass. “My God! That will need cleaning!”

W
ITHIN A FEW DAYS
after this meeting, the newspapers announced to the world that the lady of Thomas Palmer, Esq. was safely delivered of a son and heir. This event, highly important to Mrs. Jennings’s happiness, produced a temporary alteration in the disposal of her time, and influenced the engagements of her young friends; for as she wished to be as much as possible with Charlotte, she went thither every morning as soon as she was up, and did not return till late in the evening; and the Miss Dashwoods found their hours made over to Lady Middleton and the two Miss Steeles—by whom their company, in fact was as little valued, as it was professedly sought.

The presence of more guests was particularly undesirable to Lady Middleton, who of late had much to hide; at night she was clandestinely repairing the submarine that sat hidden in her pantry, teaching herself the secrets of the shipwright’s art as were necessary to weld the hull and repair the battered old propellers; by day she continued to quiz herself on
intricacies of navigation and underwater piloting, preparatory to her long-dreamed-of escape. As for Lucy, she considered Elinor and Marianne with a jealous eye, as intruding on
her
ground, and sharing the kindness which she wanted to monopolize.

Elsewhere in-Station, the pirate vogue that had been in evidence at Sir John’s theme ball had become, by this point in the season, the very height of fashionability; well-heeled gentlemen increasingly affected the air of gentlemen of fortune. A cutlass was suddenly a required accessory, and one could not stroll the Retail Embankment nor row down Marleybone High Causeway without hearing the squawk of parrots chattering on the shoulders of kerchiefed
beaux
. Games of chance and aquatic amusements such as the sea-lion rodeo were less and less in favour, replaced by sword fights, in which the men of the Station tested their mettle— though to come into combat with actual pirates would be the furthest thing from anyone’s imagining.

Elinor found these styles distasteful, especially since they coincided with a very real increase in the number of pirate attacks in the Surface-Lands; various buccaneers, including the fearsome Pirate Dreadbeard, were making the seas even more dangerous than usual, boarding any ship short of a four-master, rampaging the stores and throwing anyone aboard to the mercy of the sea monsters.

Yet more distressing was that the piratical colouring to their social round did little to elevate Marianne’s spirits. She prepared quietly and mechanically for every evening’s engagement, donning her galoshes, though without expecting the smallest amusement from any, and very often without knowing, till the last moment, where it was to take her.

One evening they travelled to the house of an acquaintance of her sister-in-law, where they were to witness a series of fights, performed with cutlass and dirk, of the sort that it was imagined brave gallants would engage in with pirates. The events of this evening were not very remarkable. The party, like other sword-fighting parties, comprehended
a great many people who had real taste for the sport, and a great many more who had none at all; and the performers themselves were, as usual, in their own estimation and that of their immediate friends, the best private duelists in England.

As Elinor was not martial, nor affecting to be so, she made no scruple of turning her eyes from the “gangplank,” which had been carefully constructed to resemble the foredeck of a schooner, such as that where an actual pirate fight might occur. In one of these excursive glances, she perceived among a group of young men, one who wore two customised arm-bands, one reading
Hail
, the other
Britannia
. She perceived him soon afterwards looking at herself, and speaking familiarly to her brother; when they both came towards her, Mr. Dashwood introduced him to her as Mr. Robert Ferrars.

He addressed her with easy civility, and twisted his head into a bow which assured her as plainly as words could have done, that he was exactly the coxcomb she had heard him described to be by Lucy. Happy had it been for her, if her regard for Edward had depended less on his own merit, than on the merit of his nearest relations! But while she wondered at the difference of the two young men, she did not find that the emptiness of conceit of the one, put her out of all charity with the modesty and worth of the other. Why they
were
different, Robert exclaimed to her himself in the course of a quarter of an hour’s conversation, as the clang of metal on metal rang out from the artificial foredeck behind them; for, talking of his brother, and lamenting the extreme
gaucherie
which he believed kept him from mixing in proper society, he candidly and generously attributed it to the misfortune of a private education; while he himself, merely from the advantage of a public school, was as well-fitted to mix in the world as any other man.

“Upon my soul,” he added, “I believe it is nothing more; and so I often tell my mother, when she is grieving about it. ‘My dear Madam,’ I always say to her, ‘you must make yourself easy. The evil is now irremediable, and it has been entirely your own doing. Why would you place
Edward under private tuition at the most critical time of his life? There to mingle with wharf rats, and become obsessed with tedious scholarly trivialities and myths of the Alteration! If you had only sent him to Westminster as well as myself, all this would have been prevented.’ This is the way in which I always consider the matter, and my mother is perfectly convinced of her error.”

As John Dashwood had no more pleasure in swordplay than his eldest sister, his mind was equally at liberty to fix on anything else; he spent most of the evening trying to recall if he had yet been paid in full for a recent experiment, in which he had eaten nothing but paddlefish roe for three days. This led to a most agreeable thought, which he communicated to his wife, for her approbation, when they got home. He would be most monstrously sick for the following week, recovering from an operation that would line his lungs with thin filaments and lamellae, such as those found in gills—surely Fanny would like to have company during his period of recovery. It would only be sensible and polite, therefore, to invite his sisters to be their guests. The expense would be nothing and the inconvenience not more, but Fanny was startled at the proposal.

“They are Lady Middleton’s visitors. How can I ask them away from her?”

Her husband did not see the force of her objection. “They had already spent a week with her, and Lady Middleton could not be displeased at their giving the same number of days to such near relations.”

“My love, I had just settled within myself to ask the Miss Steeles to spend a few days with us. They are very well behaved, good kind of girls, and I am told by Lady Middleton the younger one makes a devilish clever ship-in-a-bottle. We can ask your sisters some other year, you know; but the Miss Steeles may not be in-Station anymore!”

And so Mr. Dashwood was convinced. He saw the necessity of inviting the Miss Steeles immediately, and his conscience was pacified by the resolution of inviting his sisters another year; at the same time, however, slyly suspecting that another year would make the invitation
needless, by bringing Elinor in-Station as Colonel Brandon’s wife, and Marianne as
their
visitor.

Fanny, rejoicing in her escape, wrote the next morning to Lucy, to request her company and her sister’s, as soon as Lady Middleton could spare them. This was enough to make Lucy really and reasonably happy. Such an opportunity of being with Edward and his family was the most material to her interest, and such an invitation the most gratifying to her feelings! It was an advantage that could not be too gratefully acknowledged, nor too speedily made use of; and the visit to Lady Middleton, which had not before had any precise limits, was instantly discovered to have been always meant to end in two days’ time. Lady Middleton, for her part, was supremely pleased, as now she could focus her full attention on finalizing her rebuilt submarine.

When the note was shown to Elinor, as it was within ten minutes after its arrival, it gave her, for the first time, some share in the expectations of Lucy; for such a mark of uncommon kindness seemed to declare that the good-will towards her arose from something more than merely malice against herself; and might be brought, by time and address, to do everything that Lucy wished. Lucy possessed a remarkable, even a supernatural skill at flattery, Elinor thought, which had already subdued the pride of Lady Middleton, and made an entry into the close heart of Mrs. John Dashwood.

Thus the Miss Steeles removed to the residence of John and Fanny Dashwood, and all that reached Elinor of their influence there, strengthened her expectation of the event. Sir John, who called on them more than once, brought home such accounts of the favour they were in, as must be universally striking. Mrs. Dashwood had never been so much pleased with any young women in her life, as she was with them; she called Lucy by her Christian name; utilised her help in keeping John’s lung-gills moistened with fresh rounds of sea-water; and did not know whether she should ever be able to part with them.