CHAPTER 27

“REPORTS 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.

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.