CHAPTER 25

THOUGH MRS. JENNINGS WAS IN THE HABIT of spending a large portion of the year at the houses of her children and friends, her settled habitation was at Sub-Marine Station Beta, where she spent every winter in a docking station along one of the canals near Portman Grotto. Towards this undersea habitation, she began on the approach of January to turn her thoughts, and thither she one day abruptly asked the elder Misses Dashwood to accompany her. Elinor immediately gave a grateful but absolute denial for both. The reason alleged was their determined resolution of not leaving their mother. Mrs. Jennings received the refusal with some surprise, and repeated her invitation immediately.

“Oh, pngllgpg!” she emitted, a phrase from her native tongue translating, roughly, to “don’t be a foolish pile of elephant excrement.”

“I am sure your mother can spare you very well, and I do beg you will favour me with your company. Don’t fancy that you will be any inconvenience to me, for I shan’t put myself at all out of my way for you. We three shall be able to go in my personal submarine; and when we arrive at the Station, there will be so much to do. The Aqua-Museo-Quarium is said to have added a wealth of new creatures this season, and Kensington Undersea Gardens is expanded and more splendid than ever! I am sure your mother will not object to the journey; and if I don’t get at least one of you married before I have done with you, it shall not be my fault. I shall speak a good word for you to all the young men, you may depend upon it.”

“I thank you, ma’am,” said Marianne, with warmth. “Your invitation has insured my gratitude for ever, and it would give me such happiness to accept it. But my mother, my dearest, kindest mother—nothing should tempt me to leave her!”

Elinor understood that her sister’s eagerness to be with Willoughby was creating a total indifference to almost everything else. She therefore ventured no further direct opposition to the plan, and merely referred it to her mother’s decision. On being informed of the invitation, Mrs. Dashwood was persuaded that such an excursion would be productive of much amusement to both her daughters. She would not hear of their declining the offer upon her account; insisted on their both accepting it directly.

“I am delighted with the plan,” she cried, “it is exactly what I could wish. Margaret and I shall be as much benefited by it as yourselves. When you and the Middletons are gone, we shall go on so quietly and happily together with our books and our music.”

At that very moment, they heard a terrible, full-throated scream, loud and long, from the second floor.

“No!! Noooo!”

“My goodness!” said Miss Dashwood. “What—”

“Again!” cried Margaret, as she hurtled down the stairs and into the parlour. “It begins again!”

“I thought we had finished with this nonsense, dear Margaret!” cried Mrs. Dashwood.

“Mother! Mother, you must—” began the girl, her eyes rolling wildly in her head, her chest heaving.

“I said enough! You soon will be a child no longer, Margaret, but a woman, and these flights of fancy are no longer to be tolerated.”

“Mother,” interjected Elinor cautiously, for something in her youngest sister’s pale-white appearance and trembling shoulders led her to wonder whether there was more to Margaret’s troubled state than mere fancy.

“No, Elinor,” replied Mrs. Dashwood. “I can countenance no more such behaviour.”

Marianne meanwhile drifted towards the pianoforte, closing her mind against any further consideration of what she knew—somewhere in some dark corner of her heart—that she had seen on the day of the bluefish attack, seen blossoming foully from the peak of Mount Margaret.

“Upstairs, child,” Mrs. Dashwood commanded, “and return to your needlepoint.”

Margaret regretfully relented; she returned with heavy tread to her bedroom, to stare out the window at the same sight that had so terrified her moments ago: Mount Margaret, again issuing forth its strange geyser of steam—whilst came crawling up the hillside towards it, in uneven rows like so many black ants, hundreds and hundreds of . . . of what they were she knew not. The same uncanny, subhuman figures she had spotted on her rambles, crawling about the woods and darting in and out of the caves.

From the window, she could hear them chanting in unison, their words echoing across the island as they ascended the hill towards the grey-white jet of water: K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah! K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah! K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah!

* * *

Downstairs, Mrs. Dashwood continued as if no interruption had taken place. “It is very right that you should Descend to the Station; I would have every young woman of your condition in life acquainted with the sights and phenomena of life in-Station. You will be under the care of Mrs. Jennings, a motherly good sort of woman, of whose kindness I can have no doubt. And in all probability you will see your brother, and whatever may be his faults, or the faults of his wife, I cannot bear to have you wholly estranged from each other.”

“There is still one objection,” said Elinor, “which cannot be so easily removed.”

Marianne’s countenance sunk.

“And what,” said Mrs. Dashwood, “is my dear prudent Elinor going to suggest? What formidable obstacle is she now to bring forward? What iceberg raises she to breach the hull of our collective happiness?”

“My objection is this: Though I think very well of Mrs. Jennings’s heart, and very much admire the collection of shrunken heads she keeps in a drawer of her vanity, she is not a woman whose society can afford us pleasure, or whose protection will give us consequence.”

“That is very true,” replied her mother, “but of her society, separately from that of other people, you will scarcely have anything at all, and you will almost always appear in public with Lady Middleton.”

“If Elinor is frightened away by her dislike of Mrs. Jennings,” said Marianne, “at least it need not prevent my accepting her invitation. I have no such scruples, and I am sure I could put up with every unpleasantness of that kind with very little effort.”

Elinor could not help smiling at this display of indifference towards the manners of a person, to whom she had often had difficulty in persuading Marianne to behave with tolerable politeness. She resolved within herself that if her sister persisted in going, she would go likewise. To this determination she was the more easily reconciled, by recollecting that Edward Ferrars, by Lucy’s account, was not to be docked at Sub-Marine Station Beta before February; and that they would likely have Ascended already by then.

“I will have you both go,” said Mrs. Dashwood. “These objections are nonsensical. You will have much pleasure in the journey by personal submarine, and in being at the Station, and especially in being together; and if Elinor would ever condescend to anticipate enjoyment, she would foresee it there from a variety of sources; she would, perhaps, expect some from improving her acquaintance with her sister-in-law’s family.”

Elinor welcomed this knowing comment as an opportunity of weakening her mother’s dependence on the attachment of Edward and herself, that the shock might be less when the whole truth were revealed. She now said, as calmly as she could, “I like Edward Ferrars very much, and shall be glad to see him whether below surface or above; but as to the rest of the family, it is a matter of perfect indifference to me, whether I am ever known to them or not.”

Mrs. Dashwood smiled, and said nothing. Marianne lifted up her eyes in astonishment, and Elinor conjectured that she might as well have held her tongue.

It was settled that the invitation should be fully accepted. Mrs. Jennings received the information with a great deal of joy. Sir John was delighted; for to a man, whose prevailing anxiety was the dread of being alone, and who had developed during his years of island roving a lingering terror of angry tribal gods demanding virgin sacrifice, the acquisition of two, to the number of inhabitants in Sub-Marine Station Beta, was something. Even Lady Middleton took the trouble of being delighted, which was putting herself rather out of her way; and as for the Miss Steeles, especially Lucy, they had never been so happy in their lives. Marianne’s joy was almost a degree beyond happiness, so great was the perturbation of her spirits and her impatience to be gone.

Their launching took place in the first week in January, in Mrs. Jennings’ personal submarine, a charming, thirty-six-foot cigar-shaped vessel with a periscope detailed in the latest fashionable colours. They pulled away from the dock, and as the submarine began its slow descent under the surface of the cove, Elinor glimpsed her sister Margaret in the upstairs window, looking steadily back at her, grim-faced and piteous.

“Please,” Margaret mouthed helplessly, as the submarine disappeared beneath the surface of the water. “Please don’t leave me here alone.”